måndag 7 april 2014

Big game is starting.

Prologue

This week the course "Big Game Project" started, during the weeks leading up to this project we've been working on a concept that Jonatan Keil proposed with the working title "Open Circuit" and thus the group Freshly Squeezed was created. The game is to be created in the Unity engine.
(Click here to read the concept pitch,
The colour errors are due to Google Drive)

Last Week

My primary work last week has been with the boost that are suppose to drive the player forwards, I've also done some work on the checkpointsystem and the mechanics of the checkpoint boost. I've started to work on the camera effects to emphasize the feeling of speed.

The Boosts

(Programming art)

There are three types of boosts, the small boosts used for guidence and the weakest of the boosts. The activation boosts are less common but can be activated when the player chooses with a great bust of force. Lastly we have the checkpoint boosts, when the player enters the area of a checkpoint boost they can charge up a boost that will sling them in the direction of the vector between the player and the boost station.

The small boosts are very straight forward, when the player collide with them they instantly give the player a small amount of force in the players direction, since we're using Unity's rigidbodies all I have to do to accomplish this is too add force to the players rigidbody with the players forward vector.
The activation boost works in a similar fation, but instead of adding the force instantly it adds to a pool of boost power that the player can activate when he/she chooses, upon activation the force is added to the rigidbody.

The checkpoint boosts are the most complex of the boosts but still not that problematic. When the player enters the area of the boost, the time is slowed down, the player now start to charge a boost by holding down a button. The amount of charge is shown by the field of view increasing(as shown below), the output direction is shown by the yellow line on the ground(emphasised with red in the picture below), when the player releases the button he/she will be slingshot in this direction.
(I'm no artist, as you can see)
We had a various of ideas for the checkpoints that I concepted and tested, one idea was that when you entered the area of the checkpoint you lose control of the player and start to controll the output-direction arrow. But to make this feel good I had to add a diablo-esc camera perspective so you gott a better overview of the arrow, however we felt that this checkpoint model took you out of the gameplay and ruined the "flow" that is the key feature of this game hence we went with the other checkpoint version.

The Camera Effects

So I talked a bit about changing the FoV(Field of View) of the camera, and this is right now also our primary speed effect. Currently I change the FoV of the camera depending on the players Velocity, clamping it between 60-120 FoV. I also add some Bloom and motion blur to the camera, however all of these effects are subject to change.

The Checkpoints

Right now we are talking about how we want to handel the Checkpoints, we are currently leaning towards a model where you can toggle between all the checkpoints you've passed during your playthrough of the level. So if you want to go back more than one checkpoint that is entirely possible. When going back to a previous checkpoint the time is reset to the time you had when passing that checkpoint, however a penalty is added to your time, stopping you from just reseting form the checkpoint over and over again.


Fog of War

The last thing I've been working on is the FoW(Fog of War) for the game, in the game's level selection screen we are going to show a preview of the map with Fog of War where you haven't visited. I accomplish this by splitting the terain up in parts, then register when the player has visited one of these parts. This data is then converted into a texture with transparency where the player has been.

What's left to do is to add alpha-gradient to the borders of the visited areas.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.
-David Forssell

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