Gameplay! :D

    Since all my animations are finished I have done quite a lot of work today on a gameplay. I have implemented basic general logic for the game so now adding more levels won't be a problem.

   So what's the gameplay like?

    Well, the player is chased by 'little green guys' but only when he turns away from them and don't look at them-be careful if they get too close to you when you don't watch them it may be game over if this is the last level :P There is also a chest somewhere in the room(rotate it around to find it before little guys get you!) :D

For now that's it. Since I still have some time before submission I will now finish main menu screen, instructions screen, game over screen, win screen and credits screen, after that I will make sure all documentations is done and will do a gameplay video and then if there's still some time I will build some more levels.. ^.^

In this iteration I have also added a treasure chest I have made myself along with animations in Blender during one of the workshops for Game Development Society.

Enemies-starting on gameplay.. :)

     So I have started working on enemies for my game so that I could have at least some basic gameplay done. I wanted to reuse the script from last year I used for weeping angels but having more experience now I ended up completely rewriting it and getting rid of stuff I didn't need as well as adding other things and some changes. The script seems to work at the moment so now it will just be the case of creating animations for enemies. This way I will have to biped characters with humanoid animations. I have also changed enemies material colour to red to make them a bit different from the player.

Character animations in Unity using Mecanim (continued)

     Since last time I have finished creating the transitions between animations, now I moved on to applying movement script to the main character. This appeared to be more tricky than I though it would be. The problem I had because of the object set up I couldn't figure out why even when the position is changed the animation would snap back after looping. Eventually after experimenting with animation's options, blend trees, animations states and sub-states and after trying to ask around if anyone encountered similar problem, I have managed to get it working by enabling looping the pose instead of the whole animation. I may have to do the same thing for other animations such as crouch walking, running(if I will decide to have it in my game). Now i will work on the rest of movement mechanics and then adding more elements to the game.

Working with new UI System in Unity to create a main menu

     If it comes to creating buttons and functionality with the new Unity 4.6 UI System it is not as complicated as one can think it is. The only tricky thing at the beginning may be linking everything together as well as playing around with layout to get it exactly as you want it. I have downloaded sci-fi interface textures so to be able to start working on main menu screen. So far there is only one button-Play, which I will be working on later to simply make it look better. But most important thing is that I got it exactly where I wanted it to be and it is working, when the button is clicked it launches intro animation scene. Later I will add more buttons such as Instructions and Credits and maybe some more if needed. I have created simple UI Manager object that will handle all scene changes which means I'm always going to be using the same code- nothing here is hard coded. This is thanks to how new UI system works in Unity each button can have the same functionality attached but it will still link to different scenes.

     Main menu also contains simple glow animations made within Unity by using Mecanim.

     Below you can see the current state of my main menu-it will be updated soon- the black area will probably be used to display some images from gameplay/animation scenes.

Fade Out and Intro Animations- Done!

     As the last element for my cinematographic animation I have been working on scene fade out effect and then switching to the main game scene. According to the Unity tutorial for Fade Scene Out/In is seemed very easy to do, but unfortunately this method is outdated in Unity 4.6, which meant I had to figure this out with the new GUI system. Although there are now two methods that enable alpha and/or color fade function, none of those seemed to work.. I ended up using the solution where I created a new color and then just assigned the alpha of it and then assign it back to the canvas image component. I have also disabled some objects to prevent them from being rendered after the scene was fade out.

     Now I will move on to working on basic game mechanics so that I can have some gameplay in place for tomorrow's demo session. That will include working on movement script first and then maybe adding some objects player can interact with and/or enemies.

Level design and animations: Part 4..

     I have fixed camera movement for the cinematographic animation by deleting some key frames and therefore having more smooth camera movement. I have also corrected shake animation so now it should look much more natural. 

     Then I have moved on to playing around with particles and particle animations. I found those quite tricky to get the effects I wanted through animations, but I have managed to create a smoke that builds up as the city 'will be' collapsing.

     More cars and trees has also been added to the level design. Now moving on to more work on animations-this time collapsing city. Let the fun of 48 hours of work for this project begin! :)

Environment rotation finally fixed! :D

     Going through a lot of websites that were not helpful at all with trying to solve my problem, took me a lot of time. Today after browsing of one questions on StackOverflow I decided to open Unity documentation links that were mentioned there. The same ones I read a lot of times.. What I didn't realise was that a function transform.Rotate() takes x,y,z parameters in order: z,x,y...Noticing that little change I have decided to try this again (even though that was the first function I've tried using but it didn't work). This time I've used the parameters in suggested order...It seems that everything works correctly now and I am really happy finally having this done, as this is one of the most important features I will need in my game.

Level design and animations: Part 3..

Today I have finished level design for cinematic intro animations for my projects. Therefore now I am adding details like cars, trees, banners etc to bring the grey city to life. After that I will move on to creating collapsing animations for the building I may also work a little bit on smoke particle emitter in order to make collapsing animations a bit more 'real'. As well as this I will have to smooth out the shaking camera animations.

Level design and initial camera animations: Part 2..

     I am slowly progressing on the level design for short introductory animation scene- so far I have created couple building from assets I got and a short camera intro and shake animations. Now I will move on to create "sinking" buildings animation and then the animations for the cube walls as well as turning the light on and off animation. This will be everything I wanted to have for the intro scene. I will also have to disable players movement in this scene as I want it to be a bit cinematographic. Then it will just be the case of adding GUI at the very beginning so that there is a bit of story before the game begins.

Intro animation and a bit of level design-Part 1..

     Today I have started creating Intro scene that will consist of a short introduction animation with a bit of GUI to tell the story and show the city is collapsing, locking the player in a small area at the same time. All this in order to create a little background story to my project. After this is finished I will work on game mechanics and after that implementing GUI for menu, instructions and credits screen.
For this purpose I used assets I've been given some time ago :)

Humanoid animations in Unity! :)

     So we were given a model with some basic set up for animations. Today I have been working on implementing those into my project. Setting up an animator with all the transitions is quite easy to do in Unity. So setting up the transitions itself didn't take up much time. Figuring out all needed connections between animator and the script that would enable playing those animations on specific button presses was more tricky to set up. I set couple triggers so that button presses will trigger appropriate animations and connected them in hopefully reasonable way.

     I have also set random number generation(using .NET library instead of Unity random number generation as I found it not accurate enough) so that whenever player stops walking stand animation or stand idle animation is chosen randomly. I did that in order to use as many provided animations for the character as possible and also because I wanted to make it a bit more various.

Here is the screenshot of my animator window in Unity:

Environment rotation issues...

Before the first demo session I have started working on environment rotation mechanics. I started with easiest solution which would be to rotate the parent of all child wall objects with transform.Rotate() function. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work properly. Then I tried couple other solutions including changing object rotation through transform.rotation by creating a quaternion to change it to. This included using Euler angles to set the values of the quaternion. I have also tried out RotateAround() method and it also didn't seem to be accurate enough.. I am yet to find a working solution to that problem and since animations are most important in this project I will focus on those for now and get back to this problem later.