Development Diary #13: Town planning…

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to fix down the final scope of the game. Since I started working on the idea it’s ballooned from a few rooms to a sprawling epic and all the way back down again. In the end, if I’m going to make something I’m happy with, that’s actually finish-able, I’ll need to set some boundaries…

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Development Diary #12: Quality settings…

This month I’ve been straying well outside my comfort zone to work on an in-game menu allowing players to change various quality settings during runtime. Unity offers a standard, built-in menu that appears when a game starts up but it hides several settings under “Quality Levels”, has a rather confusing input editor and requires the player to restart the game in order to make any changes. It’s also not customizable to any great extent and doesn’t really create the best first impression, so I thought I’d try and make my own.

All the menu elements are 3d objects as opposed to uGUI buttons, I’m using Playmaker for all the scripting and Easy Save 2 for saving/loading data and, as I haven’t completely nailed down how I’m handling input yet, the setup responds only to mouse and keyboard input, hopefully controller and touch wont be too tricky to add in later on…

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Development Diary #11: Costume changes…

Following on from the drag-and-drop prefabs I was previously looking at, I’ve recently been working on a process for swapping Unity’s skinned meshes at runtime. At the moment I’m using it just to change costumes on a single character, but it should come in handy later on for sharing animation clips between different background NPCs etc. as well…

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Development Diary #6: On location

It’s taken me a while to get going this year but, in between commercial bits and pieces, I’ve been working on some environments. Although the overall narrative for the game is still coming together, I have loads of different locations already in mind that I’m trying to wind the story around. Most are based on real places or, more often, a combination of places that have stuck in my head. This week I’ve been working on a Victorian swimming pool…

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