More Camerawork and Spontaneous Networking

It's week 17 and it's three weeks into the big game project, there has been a lot of talk in the group as of late but mostly about level design. But since I'm not one of the level designers I'm not going to talk about that in my blog.

Camera

So the camera has been a top priority as of late, the last two weeks I've been trying out some different camera models. The first one i tired out was a free-rotating that the player had complete controll over, but I also made it snapp back to it's original position behind the player when it hadn't been moved in a while. I then restraint the camera so it couldn't go below the ground and not rotate above the player. Having That whould make the player upside-down or the camera would have to rotate it in the Y-axis make it face-up and I didn't think that would look good.

For the air camera I ended up making it look towards the spot the player would land, this was easy since Petter already calculate the ladningspot for the movement code. All I had to do was to calculate the vector between the camera and landingspot, normalize it and move the camera back x times that vector from the payer to get a nice overview.

HUD

Jonatan feelt that we needed some sort of "overview-button" that when pressed zoomed out the camera and gave the player a huge overview of the area. Robert then came up with the idea that we could display the some sort of HUD on that overview aswell. So i set out on creating this, when the left thubstick is pressed and hold the time slows down and the camera zooms out, the HUD then fades in and shows the player the only info it could want to know.

Networking

So last tuesday we spontaneously decided to add co-op into the game, since this was something that mostly needed programming. I don't have that much to do at the moment other than to create small scripts for the artists like when they want something to spin or a texture to pan and so on. So with that in mind and after countless requests from playtesters to add multiplayer I started to work on the multiplayer. Unity's networking is really grateful to work with and after one day I had a working build.

What I will be working on this week is to reduce the lag and adding some HUD that indicates where the other players are, since you can loose eachother quite easy as it stands.

These images are quick mockups of how that HUD might work.

Wether these HUD's will show at all time or when the player clicks the left thubstick is still under discussion, perhaps we'll make it an option.

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

-David Forssell