DevLog #4 - Production train is here Choo chooo!

Welcome to our 4. DevLog. This time it's gonna be much more interesting than last time! So buckle up and here we go:

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Environment

Trees - We modelled tree with vertex colors that are used for snow pilling effect and for future wind function. We also use one color channel for gradient from bottom to the top, it can also be colored just to give it a little umpf. With this shader it's really easy to create snow melting effect or making some small color variations just to break up the repetition.

We also made a lantern with a pointlight attached to it. We were first going to use an emissive material for the lighting, but this makes it so that the pole itself casts no shadow.

Wood texture - We also made our first out of many smart materials we are gonna use across our assets, this one is simple wood, this version might not be final, but it's a good base for now.

Rocks - For rocks we also created quick smart material that is gonna be used as a base texture for our rocks.

With some assets we could get into our basic shader with some cool features we wanted in our game:

Yes our snow feature... We can easily pile up some snow on our assets with a simple slider. We have also some manual tweaks we can do like edge sharpness, opacity of the snow etc...

The materials for the terrain will be visible at all times, so it was important to put a lot of effort into them. Making them look good in Designer is one thing though, making them look good in Unity is another.

Our main texture for our terrain, snow:

Grass: 

Other material is this brick wall:

Talking about Unity, a snow particle system was created. Combining random values in between constants for velocity and some subtle noise gave a very realistic result for the movement of the snow. Later on in the polish sprint (or sooner if it is necessary) custom sprites will be made for the snowflakes, to take it to the next level.

In our game there are frequent snowstorms. The programmers will change the particle system's parameters during runtime. Parameters like spawnrate, velocity and particle size will gradually increase over a few seconds to give seamless transition from light snowfall to heavy snowfall.

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Character

So this is all when it comes to environment, so let's now look at our main character. Player will be seeing him all the time, so it was important to get the look right. A bright green hat and gloves will make the kid easily recognizable in the snowy environment. (And also keep him warm during the blizzard):

We also started messing around in Adobe Mixamo for the animation of our character. Nothing is final for that yet, but here are some gifs to give you a taste for what might be coming.:

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UI

Next we have some basic UI This is how we imagine our main menu:

We also made some ingame HUD (visualization) a basic health bar an ice cube that melts away for the enemies, while the player health bar will be in the upper left corner.

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Programming

When it comes to some programming, we are transffering from our prototype to our main project. Which takes a lot of time and nerves, to actually clean and give correct naming conventions and adapt them to new project.

We added some base scripts for the player and enemy that they both share movement, basecharacter, health scripts. 

Also we added the player prefab which can move with the given input, can spawn, roll and throw snowballs. The snowball is also a prefab which increases in size if rolled by the player. 

The snowball is also a prefab which increases in size if rolled by the player.

The enemy prefab is also added, which goes to target (player or snowball if near one) and attacks it.

Also added the enemy manager and the gamemode which are connected. Game Mode basically spawns the enemies via enemy manager on the spawn points in the world.

We added a tile system to the project. These tiles will serve as a basis for whether the player can spawn a snowball at that point or not.

The idea here is to have the snow slowly deplete on the map forcing the player to move around and search for new areas. 

Talking about snow, we added a HDRP snow shader into the game which tesselates and dynamically changes the height of the snow. There is a plane above the tiles that creates an uneven surface for you to wade through.

Some basic sounds were added in as well! There is a sound manager which handles the global music in the scene. You'll hear a nice theme composed by one of the developers play in the background while the game is running. When the player throws a snowball, a placeholder sound is also implemented.

And that's for this week all, hope to see you next week!