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Hi ya’ll!
First blog post of the Big Game Project course, and the first production week!
During this course I will try to make 3 posts focused on artifacts from more of a game design perspective,
and 3 posts focused more on how the artifacts has been programmed or created.
It has been a while since this blog was used, however new year and new game requires for some posts here.
So what has been done since the “Big Game Project” course started? Well, the game we are making now is called “Somnium” and is about the 7 year old girl Olivia.
She recently moved from Spain to Sweden and now she is experiencing a case of really bad nightmares. The player will get to experience and conquer the fears of Olivias nightmares.
Making a game where the player is in a dream gives us a really good opportunity to do some nice design choices and cool SFX.
This meant we started prototyping the first two weeks of BGP, and came up with some pretty nice prototypes of camera effects, shaders, movement mechanics and camera controller.
Specifically for me; this week has been about refining the camera, and creating state of the art movement mechanics, specifically designed to fit our game.
Camera follow:
Since we are working in unity, we could have gone with a simple camera solution, where the camera only follows the player, and is sort of “static” in its behaviour.
However, we are not going with simple in this game. Instead we made a script for the camera that very smoothly follows the player if the player is moving around.
If the player is standing still, the camera can be rotated around the character, but as soon as the character starts moving again, the camera lerps to the target position and rotation.
Next post I will give you some more information and details on how I went about creating this.
Movement mechanics:
Since the player is a little girl that is very scared, and is located inside of a nightmare, she will not be able to move around very fast, except when running from something super scary.
This meant that the movement needed to feel like it really was a 7 year old frightened girl moving around.
Olivia will therefore walk slowly, and smoothly lerp in the direction she wants to walk when changing direction.
This should give her movement a nice and natural look, when walking around exploring her dream world. However what is currently awkward is that she is not really able to
walk backwards, she has to awkwardly turn around, which is a bit slow, and might feel weird when walking into a tight place. This will be something that needs to be playtested.
Olivia will also be able to climb over a few small objects. I’ve never created a climbing mechanic before,
and the way I went about doing this was making her lerp from her current position to the current positon + the height of the object she is standing in front of, while at the same time removing the gravity of her rigidbody.
Currently it just looks like she is hovering into position, and she kind of looks like a magician. Hopefully it will look a lot more natural with a climbing animation, otherwise this will have to be reworked.
That was all for this post, next post I’ll go more in depth with how the movement and camera has been programmed.
Bye!
About Anton Olin
2015 Programming
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