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#05 Tutorial Design with Unity

Unity is very flexible and allows programmers a myriad of solutions to solve an issue like tutorials. In our case, we have created an event sequence based on our needs and the story we want to portrait.

We have created scripts to run through the sequence we require. Every action can be controlled in one menu. 

The Player starts the game with a comic, then immediately the Captain urges the player to land on the planet. We select a location and off we go. 

This system allows us to create popups that portrait certain events, like selecting a  landing zone a.k.a. the first level...

Or the introduction of a new unit...

The event of the popup can be modified according to the needs, in this case, an enemy model gets loaded in idle mode and a text is loaded from the text sheet to provide details about the unit. 

The flexible sequence system allows us to control which buttons can be clicked, what is locked and in what order the game proceeds. 

[planetelysiatd]

#04  Production Tools Basics

For those of you who are curious about how small teams organize their project work I want to give you some little insights of our production tools.

I want to share a brief overview about our inhouse project management organisation and the tools we use. We have a small team and can communicate short ways based on the fact we are most in the same office during the day. But we have team members that work externally, and sometimes home office is in order if the harsh winter messes with the heater.

For a project of this magnitude it is necessary to have good tools for organizing the amount of tasks and content for our game. In general you could say that we established a more or less agile development environment that makes use of some techniques known from Scrum without sticking too much to it. We try to have regular meetings and give decent feedback rounds to features and assets within the team as soon as possible. For inhouse communication we started to use Slack a while ago. https://slack.com/ 

Many of you might be familiar with Slack, but for those who are not,  here comes a small description. Its a free tool for team communication, where you can have multiple chat channels based on separated topics. Even though there is a Pro Version for more specified needs, bigger teams and bigger projects, we are fine with the free version.

So it is easy to organize separate theme related chats, for example one room for art, one for programming, one for game system design. 

You can share pictures and files, have closed discussions, create multiple chat rooms and much more.

Personally, the most positive aspect is that you can find older entries and especially files more easily compared to skype chats.  In the background we use a well known solution called Atlasian Bitbucket.  https://bitbucket.org

Its perfect for our needs. We integrated it within our development structure and our version control of the project (using SourceTree). The dashboard is clean, simple and provides a good overview.

The bugtracking functionality is quite similar to other tools like Mantis, Redmine and follows established QA standards. 

We don’t connect it to JIRA yet, but might do so in the future to have more possibilities.We use it mostly for priority and dependency tracking of bugs and features. One benefit is that you can tag specific branches directly to existing bugs. The seamless integration works great. It supports multiple Teams, repositories and projects. 

The software also offers many other features, like it’s own wiki.

For our daily task management we use a solution called HackNPlan. http://hacknplan.com/

Its a pretty nice tool, still in Beta, but the developers put a lot of effort in it and it offers a great and solid toolkit at this early stage.

It follows the rules of a Kanban board where you can edit or pick single tasks and move them over the board whatever state they are actual in > Planned, InProgress, Testing or Completed. 

Right now we are moving from milestone to milestone based on our project plan.

We keep a growing backlog were we pull tasks for upcoming milestones from and try to keep short sprint periods for bigger development cycles.

Each task can be given several sub-tasks. We are still learning how to reduce task size and break it down more efficiently at the moment.

A single task can contains all the necessary information for proper monitoring like specified due dates, multiple assigners, milestones, estimated time and more.

It helps me monitoring time frames for single tasks to get more efficient in future planning of sprints and the performance of the team.

The offered dashboard for project metrics visualizes every aspect in a clean and easily readable way. You can evaluate performance for each part of the project and have an overview about delays and performance breaks. The possibilities for personal settings are also great.

We are looking forward for future features of this great tool.

We  hope this short excursion provides some insights for you guys.

​

[planetelysiatd]

#03 Layer composition in Unity

We are currently working on the level design for our upcoming mobile tower defense game @planetelysiatd. Today we want to show you how we put together a level in Unity.

We set up the waves for the game with Splines inside Unit. All enemies move on predefined lanes that we usually define in triple splines. Then we define a start and an endpoint for the enemies to follow.

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These are the core layers for the game. Based on a 2,5D world system, the level consist of multiple 2D layers divided into foreground and background layers. The background is prerendered partially in 3D and imported as a single picture to save resources. Animated 2D background elements on sprites can be setup in various layers to give additional depth to the scene.

Background lava shader

Foreground level render

Foreground lava shader

UI Elements layer with the UnityGUI

3D Elements, as in heroes, towers, enemies

Here the final result in gamemode.

[planetelysiatd]

#02 UI Design - Levelselection Menu

Today we want to share some insights about the process behind the planning & execution for our actual level selection in Unity3D. We were aiming for a futuristic level selection style that should be interactive and feels cool when you use it. The chart defines roughly the user flow.

Following these constraints we build mockups from wireframes for each screen of the main menu. In this case we just show the relevant level selection draft.

To make the menu more interactive we decided to make it in 3D.

From a base sphere with a smart UV Mapping we added some sculpted detail and did some quickmaps in SubstancePainter

Next we set up a Unity Scene and added a Shader with moving UVTiles on another sphere to create an atmospheric look for the Planet.

In the end and with some more post FX on the main camera we came up with this pretty and smart solution. Please note that it is still temporary and under development.

We defined clickable game objects for each level as level selectors on the planet surface. Each spot consists of a popup with animation controllers plus some buttons and reward system. 

@madhatsassembly

@jan_n_

[planetelysiatd]

Yesterday we showcased the latest version of #PlanetElysiaTD @TalkandPlay. THX to Nomi for putting us on Vine. Stay tuned!

[planetelysiatd]

#01 Level Design

We are working on the design for further levels. Nancy made a lot of progress on the color scheme and the designs of single level elements. The levels are designed in 2D, then taken to 3D, then precomposed and prerendered. Only a single picture of the background will make it to Unity. 

@madhatsassembly @nordlichtNN

[planetelysiatd]

Ho, fellow space pirates! Here for a while only... An alpha sneak preview of our latest version. 

There is trouble ahead! And soon you’ll see more! 

[planetelysiatd]

Hey, we have another piece to read for you! The story unfolds!!! 

Enjoy! 

Cheers!

[planetelysiatd]

So, we’ve come up with some background for you guys. 

Please enjoy our first story snipet! Have fun!  Cheers! 

[planetelysiatd]

Welcome to our DevBlog

Hello fellow space pirates... We are Mad Hats Assembly! And this is our DevBlog. We want to share our ideas with you and let you be part of our journey. 

We have decided on a name for our game:

Planet Elysia TD - A Space Pirates Odyssey

In the coming months we will show you what we come up with. So, stay tuned, and may the loot be raining, space pirate!