Moonchild

One challenges that we have had to deal with over the semester is glitches that appear while we make edits and additions to the game. Troubleshooting errors is a normal part of making a game, but it is always interesting when one appears and you need to find out what went wrong. Some issues we dealt with included: character models mysteriously losing an arm, characters being able to run up walls, being able to jump infinitely when we try to create double jump, and audio files refusing to play correctly. I will never forget the late nights we spent scratching our heads over particularly troublesome issues.

This is video demonstrating the Night Vision ability for our main character. In the game the player has the task of locating moon fragments scattered around the map. Some of these moon fragments are invisible making it difficult for the player to find them. This ability is designed to allow the player to see the invisible moon fragments. After the player’s night vision ability is activated the fragments will become visible for a few seconds and then disappear again. Collecting all of the invisible fragments won’t be easy, the player will need to be constantly on the lookout.

These are moon fragments. In our game Moonchild, the moon, the source of power for the moon children, has been destroyed and its fragments have been scattered all around the forest. In order to fix the moon, and restore peace amongst his fellow moonchildren, our main character Hound has taken up the task of collecting all the moon fragments. Finding the moon fragments will not be an easy task. Some of the moon fragments are in hard to reach places and will require hounds enhanced agility. Other fragments have been affected by the moon’s magic and will require Hound’s special abilities to find them.

For our prototype last week, we were in a scramble to polish our assets, particularly our NPC models that still needed to be rigged, skinned, and animated. Before that, I changed our lighting so that it's actually nighttime (our game is called Moonchild after all), added a matching skybox, and added particle effects to our bonfire and moon fragments.

Our game certainly looks different compared to our previous environment screenshots. There are still some things we need to adjust, such as the low resolution of the skybox, which is a free asset from the Unity Asset Store called Fantasy Skybox FREE. We’ll probably also make the ambient lighting darker and rely more on bioluminescent lighting in the form of abstract plants, fireflies, etc.

These are three NPCs that I rigged, skinned, and animated in 3ds Max using Biped rigs. The outer characters were modeled by Julian and I modeled the one in the middle.

To add personality to our characters despite a lack of dialogue, we wanted to make the wood elf act a bit haughty. Professor Todd Harper was present and he remarked that the elf looks like he’s smoking a cigarette. His feedback made me realize that actions must be made clear and distinct from similar, unrelated ones. Either that or I could add a cigarette to the elf’s hand, but then it wouldn’t really fit the setting nor be family-friendly (lol).

Julian mentioned that making this character sit down would add some nice variety to our NPCs’ poses since they’re mostly standing. I plopped him on a log since sitting on the ground introduced major clipping on the kilt. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking by making him do a little dance, but I knew that I wanted to make the NPC below do a hula hoop animation, so I guess I made this one do something similar to compliment it.

This is the wolf chief for our game moonchild. he will be the one giving the instructions for the prototype quest. 

Hi there. This weekend is a big one because our prototype needs to be done by the end of next week and we have to have everything working. My work this week is to get a object pick up system working and a quest system in place so that the player has a objective to complete for the prototype test. The objective system is actually  just a extended part of the pick up system that will tie into the quest system. i also need to add dialog for the quest so that the player has a person who can help him know what to do.  so there is going to be alot of things turning on and off in the In-game UI where as the GUI will be displaying object pick ups and quest objectives. hopefully i can get the quest objective display up and running by the end of the weekend but for now im really focusing on creating the object pickup/objective system and figuring how to tie them all together. hope to be able to provide some footage with my next post!

This is a video showcasing the Smell ability for our main character. The ability is designed to be a visual representation of the main character using his enhanced sense of smell to track down a target. To do this a script is attached to the character that when triggered will temporarily instantiate an arrow that will point toward the player’s current target.

This is a video showcasing the Howl ability for our main character. The ability is designed to allow the main character to break specific objects using a powerful shout. To do this a script is attached to the main character that once triggered will instantiate and propel forward a representational sound wave in the direction that the player is facing. If the sound wave collides with a destructible object that object will be destroyed.

This is a video showcasing the scripts for player movement in the. The movement script allows the player move forward and backward and to strafe left and right. The script also has the main camera follow the player and track mouse movement so that the player can turn using the mouse. There is also a jump script that allows the player to perform double jumps.

Test Run of Hound in Unity

This is a video of a test script for hound in the unity engine. we use Unity Collab so we can develop and practice in our own scenes without effecting the actual game scene or others tests. this is in my test lab. I worked on getting the animator controller and player controller using a test script. I learned how to do all of this using this series of tutorials here!

the animation for Hounds Howl ability. this allows him to use his super howl to smash through breakable walls and rocks etc. this will be combined with a howling sound to give more effect

Here is the interaction animation for hound. we wanted him to have an animation for when he picked up items for the game.

Here is the idle animation i made for Hound. I wanted to try a little bounce to his movement. 

This week, I did more research on creating an environment in Unity. I experimented with using Unity’s terrain system, which proved to be fast and efficient for sculpting and texturing. Another advantage is being able to quickly paint detail meshes like custom grass textures. I made the grass in 3ds Max by modeling variations of blades and using Projection Mapping in the Render to Texture dialog. This works great with Unity’s automatic alpha transparency recognition for textures. You can easily create your own stylized/realistic grass cards by following this tutorial.

Grass modeled and projection mapped in 3ds Max.

The actual texture and the alpha transparency included.

In Unity, I painted the grass onto the terrain and placed the trees by hand. I tried painting the trees as detail meshes too, but I discovered that they don’t have any collision at all. Besides grass, detail meshes are best used for things like small rocks that the player character will clip through without the player noticing too much.

This weekend, I plan to experiment with a nighttime skybox (our game’s called Moonchild after all), look into blue-tint lighting, and create some nice particle effects for a huge bonfire that NPCs will surround.

Using Julian’s sketches, I created a rough environment for our starting area featuring mountains and a ground. I also created more props, including more trees, rocks, platforms, a crystal, a moon fragment, a torch, and woodcutting axe. All of these assets were carefully UV unwrapped and quickly textured in Substance Painter. The diffuse textures are mostly 128x128 resolution due to the simplicity of the flat color used in our art style. This can always be changed later to detailed, higher resolution textures.

These assets were imported into Unity, shown above, and they were rescaled in proportion to the 1-meter cube shown to the right. Although we were planning on using Unity’s Toon Lit shader in order to create a stylized look, it creates messy shadows on objects, so the Standard shader is being used for now. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the textures, and they will be adjusted as we change our game lighting. Next is creating colliders for testing Julian’s animated player character.