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At Last...

So, friends and acquaintances...I have news for you.

The game is complete! Well, the prototype is and though it was a short rollarcoster ride, it was still a rollarcoaster ride nonetheless! I had an incredible time making this demo and though there are many many things I wish I had had the time to clean up, I am still satisfied with the result and the visual appeal of it all. To finish off I created a title scene for it, oddly enough creating the button was the hardest part of it since I couldn’t quite figure out what was meant to be plugged into where, as well as the fade animation I had for it kept looping...I couldn’t quite find a way to correct this so instead i just extended the animation duration by a minute.

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For some odd reason, it will not let me add a title to this but here we have it, my final and (favorite) mechanic. The Death Light (well, that’s not actually what it’s called.) In actuality, it’s called the security surveillance camera that’s patrolling this entire area and as our player is a known escapee with people after him, if he’s caught in the light, he’s dead. Above is a video of the first version of the light moving, I had to animate it using key frames and it worked wonderfully, however I realized it was too fast for our boy to outrun and it went through dramatic changes. The biggest change was removing that rock wall in avour of something a little stonehedge looking but that looks like as if it’s been put there by man to aid in their construction tasks (brick piles, above and below, a plank to transfer such heavy bricks up on top of the rock.) Th reason for doing this was both for design as well as to give him something to hide under while the light passes over this. This was initially inspired by a scene form inside where a similar if not the exact same mechanic was used but by a different type of machine:

I had to figure out a way for the boy to avoid the trigger area as it passed over him, thus it led me to animating the trigger sphere completely separately to the point light. (Ah, also we decided on a point light as visually it looked far better than a spotlight, even though the fade out of the spotlight was ideal; It was simply far too tricky and kinky to mess around with with the limited amount of time we had left.) This....involved a lot of tweaking and a lot of working with the animation by the second, as it had to match the exact movements of the light, avoid the rocks by moving far back and be large enough and return into position fast enough to kill the boy if he got anywhere in the light at all. An unforgiving mechanic is what I hope for this one!

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Errors, Errors and A New Mechanic?!

Ladies and gentlemen, I come to you with the familiar news of compiler errors. Over the course of the past couple of days I’ve been doing nothing but running into errors within my code left and right (since those are the only directions we can move in, haha! get it? Never mind.) Many of them include issues with our floating rock that the boy must push into the water to well, cross the water. The first issue we’ve identified is the animation not being triggered by the pushing of the rock, the second being t’s kinematic properties stay checked the entire time when it is meant to start unchecked- in turn causing the rock to be floating in air instead of on water. And the third is when it does in fact play the key framed animation, it starts meters behind where it is meant to start playing from. Of course all have been fixed now, how? you guessed it, debugging! and a lot more complicated functions and triggers that I won’t throw myself into on here. Instead I’d much rather tell you about the seesaw mechanic I’ve put in at the strat of the game. 

So at the start, as you set off, you find a plank in your way next to a pile of bricks that are most likely for construction purposes (most definitely are), and you must pull a brick onto the plank in order to keep it down so you can run up it and jump to the next rock. The issue with this was WHERE to put it? It had to be so the player could run past it if he tried but would have had to come back after realizing he cant jump that high, nor can the plank stay in it’s initial position, which should hopefully lead him to the bricks. At times I’ve encountered issues with running past the plank and knocking it clean off the holder its balancing on, but this is rare and shouldn’t NORMALLY happen. Fingers crossed. The only downside of this that we weren’t able to fix was him crouching down and dragging the bricks over as we didn’t have time. So we ended up with him pushing and pulling as he should but it looks a little more like he’s controlling the object with his mind....ah well.

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Music is in!

GOOD NEWS! I’ve been working closely with one of my friends to produce some creepy, atmospheric ambient soundtrack for the game and success! we have music! The main soundtrack is an eerie, goosebump-inducing piece that is simply just a lot of ambiance really, and hats off the the music technology genius who made it for me, he also produced a background sound effects clip that really makes it feel as if you’re walking through a cave- long, low humming sound, water dripping. It’s fantastic, I’m excited. Though unfortunately I’m not allowed to add the clips here I am allowed to give full credits to Alberto Matesanz Diaz, a second year CMT (Creative Music Technology) student who’s amazing at what he does.

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Ladders, rocks and whatnot

Today we added a bulk of the mechanics the boy will be interacting with. We started with writing down the basic code for the boy to push and pull objects, even if he isn’t doing the animations for it, he’s at least triggered by the pressing of two keys at once which is exactly what we want; arrow key + Left Crtl button to interact with and move objects. The process involved lots of trigger spheres and separate box colliders, I’ve also found quite a few faults within the process of pushing a box over and standing on it as either he will slip off of it if not placed correctly or pushed properly, or he will end up pushing the rock out of place WHILE pushing it down which results in it not being able to fall down because the boy is out of the trigger area. To resolve the latter from happening, I increased the trigger area as well as the box collider so he will have no choice but to be within the trigger area as well be able to walk across it and not die!

The second task that came with this was having him actually look as if he’s pushing and pulling things rather than walking straight into it. This was relatively easier to do than the first task, quite simply all that needed to be done was trigger the animations in the pushPull section of our code.

The final task we accomplished today was the ladder. Ah, the ladder- there were many doubts about adding the ladder in to the prototype given the time constraints we were facing but without it, it made for a rather awkward transition upward to the next level of ground he needed to be at. So we decided to throw in our ladder except, instead of having him climb like  a normal being our player has to suffer a tiny bit and hop up the ladder every step of the way until he meets ground. On the bright side, he doesn’t die if he falls off!

(no pictures today, so sorry guys!)

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Some Inspiration- The Mighty Dragon Bridge

I thought I’d share a few reference images I’ve been working off on, both for inspiration in what to bring next in to the game’s prototype as well as those I’ve been using to work on the environment as a whole. I quite love the first one as the beast’s bones appear so grand and majestic, especially against the cave’s terrain. It’s what inspired me to actually attempt to bring in an interactive dragon bridge for our boy to cross over, which is where the game prototype shall end. Upon attempting to bring it in, I had to use quite a few box colliders to place on top of the spine of the dragon’s skeleton as the original mesh collider was too unstable and uneven for our player character to run across and over. It was relatively easy although it did take quite a few tries in order to get right and various camera angle shifts to make it seem as if he WASN’T floating in air to the human eye. 

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A Tad Bit Lost...but Still Going!

At the moment, though it is rather annoying to admit but we just the tiny bit stumped at where to go on next from here. Coding requires heavy work and often comes up with errors which I have seen far too many of while attempting to code how our little boy moves. I die a little on the inside every time I see this message:

So as we are a bit stuck on the technical parts of moving objects and moving well the boy himself, we shall l keep decorating- onwards!  It’s really patching up together, especially after adding a few post processing affects and a particle system fog that’s tinted the lightest hint of red.

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Don’t Mind The Bones- Building the Detail

So now that we’ve got an idea of the environment we want, we’re trying to build even more on it on it, layering it so it looks impeccably 3D. When I was playing Inside, I remember something that frustrated me the most was not being able to explore the amazing environments that we kept passing by throughout the game but at the same time it also made me in awe of the detail it held, the tiniest shadows, or objects adding a touch of realism that was almost haunting. I wish to achieve the same effect with my game, however with more focus on it being atmospheric as the time given did not allow extensive focus on environment only..The only problem at the moment, it seems, is figuring out a way to make the cave seem endless without changing the overall background color to something lighter, as it just looks pitch black at the moment and it feels as if it is missing something.  We will return to this tomorrow again! Also do ignore the bones, we’ve got some new assets that we’ve been playing around with a bit too much.

Assets:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/bones-skulls-pack-48756

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Step One!

Shooting off with our unity engine, I’ve started blocking out the environment using these wonderful low-poly assets I found on the unity store I tried to get a rough outline of the perspective I wanted to achieve and started pushing down different kind of rocks in all different sorts of rotations and positions to give the illusion of a cave background. At first I found it difficult to imagine, and it took me forever to make any progress,  However, with a little help from my tutor, I managed to expand on my scene even further. nother thing concernin the environment that took a little extra consideration would have to have been the lighting. Changing from directional light to a point light lost me a lot of detail on objects but also brought me the illusion of a dark cave wonderfully, esepcially having it red; the perfect atmospheric lighting. Though, I did have to keep an extra directional light on the player to keep him well lit.

Asset References:

(https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/low-poly-rocks-pack-70164)

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/low-poly-crystal-cave-82797

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/low-poly-animated-people-109774

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HELLO

Welcome to my game development blog. I’m here with my first ever game prototype “Below.” A low-poly, 2.5D  puzzle-platformer adventure game inspired by none other than Playdead’s Inside and Limbo.

It features a young boy on what feels like an endless mission to escape from the confines he’s found himself in. Initially I wanted the boy to awaken in some sort of facility, more on the side of a laboratory with no recollection of who or where he is. I had planned for him to rebel against the man holding him down when he wakes up, in turn causing him to flee the vicinity and be written down as an escapee for the workers to chase after. I would then proceed with building the prototype of having him simply run, hide and sneak past those after him in the lab/facility like setting, however I changed this and instead of sticking only to the lab I wanted the element of mystery that came with an entire operation going on underground- thus giving birth to the idea of construction in underground, secret catacombs that he falls into by accident while running away. 

It’s a side scroller so the movement of the character I wanted was already set in stone, and he was limited to only a few interaction method with objects as time was not on my side for this project. 

Without further ado, onwards!