Hey everyone, so the site has had some issues transferring hosting, so everything isn’t how I want it but this is good for now…
So….
Today, I finished work for the year, I won’t have to go back to the office for a few weeks meaning I will be able to work on the game as much as I want. So what do I have planned for these weeks, well apart from going to a party at the New Year nothing really… I’m joking, I have a few ideas of what I want to do, one is work on the Forest Level, I started to work on it since Sunday after being heavily hungover and tired of travel which I won’t go into details about. But here is a preview of what I got so far before I started going back to the code to change both, the AI, UI and a new game mechanic which I had an idea about but its finding the way to make it happen.
But I want to quickly talk about the screenshot to the right———>
This is the first look of the Forest, this was the level that starts the whole TUTORIAL section off, you awake in the snow, lost in the woods, you have no idea where you are and the only way out is the blue lights.
The idea behind this level is a feeling I got when I first heard Cogs and funnily enough I first heard it whilst I was playing Transit and I had discovered Nacht, the feeling of finding it I’ll never forget and I want to recreate that with this level, so if you leave the path who knows what you’ll find. Maybe the ruins where the man with the 5 was last seen.
So lets break this down to make things easier, UI, AI and new mechianic.
- Lets start with Text. Unity has the same text renderer since 2012, its very poor at scaling and keeping sharp, something I learned at my job bitmap is nothing compared to vectors, I knew of a tool called TextMeshPro which Unity has and I’m surprised they ain’t just integrated it into the engine, anyway HFPS is a bit of a struggle to get it to work with TextMesh but I have managed to get it to work so the text is now much more customisable like gradients and glowing this is where my mind went into overdrive.
- I needed to work out how to change the text to a slider which I managed to make some code which translates the health number into a slider. This allows me to a make a health bar so I can finally make the health system look like how I always originally thought, a blood vial, so I quickly jumped on Affinity Designer and made 3 parts, the background, the blood (Inverted for the Lantern Fuel) and the foreground i.e. the reflection. I hoping as I write this that I will be able to make the lantern one change blue when using the flashlight and purple when its modded to dark light. But the overall idea is you will see the vials empty as you take both damage and loose fuel.
Now the AI, originally it was using the once provided by HFPS, I’ve always known that Emerald AI works with it, well I was in discussion with another developer and they explained to me that one mechanic I wanted to try out works with Emerald, so at the time I didn’t have time to make both the demo which only a select few will see and overhaul the AI, now I’m off I’m going to work on changing it around as I have had an idea for a game mechanic and this is the system that will allow me to do it.
Now the Game Mechanic, it requires two things, The Lantern & The AI. So I have one part sort of working, just getting it to return to its right state and the cool down timer which I haven’t started yet, the next is making the light freeze the enemy ai and one thing I haven’t worked out yet is making AI attack each other which now I think about it is making me think of Doom remember when you could make the ai fight each other and then run. So both of those mechanics can help you save your bullets for more… important things.
Yes a lot to get done these next few weeks but I have a lot coming my way and as I’m writing this today is nothing compared to last weekend if not the polar opposite of it.
So till then cheerio and mind the gap.
♟️