Wednesday 17 April 2013

Recorded Audio

Recorded some of the characters voices with Matt Cassar.

Changed again

Originally there were two different maps of Australia, One for the minimap and one for the Region. Changed it so there is only one now. The regions have been placed on another layer and the minimap culls them so they're no longer rendered. This allows the abilities that the player can use to control the varroa mite to be seen on the mini map as well.

It looks awesome =]

New boundary

Added a mathf.clamp to the region cameras anchor object and deleted the bounding boxes. The regions are no longer stacked, we encountered a problem with ray-casting through them.




Yeah it's not actually laid out like that had to change it for the picture.

Region movement, Back button

The camera movement in the region view is based off of an invisible moving object that the camera is anchored to. When they click the mouse and move the anchor moves and the camera lerps to the anchors position in world space.

The lerping function in unity interpolates between two different numbers over a period of time and can be used to handle many different variables.  I use it a lot to smooth out movement, previously the camera movement was slightly jerky but now is as smooth as ice =]

Also added a back button to the mini map that allows you to go into the scenario view instead of selecting it from the minimap again.

Region Bounds OLD

Boundary box for camera

Region nav.


Mini map re-sizes to bottom left hand corner of the screen when region map is selected. 
Mini Map View
Region view
Stacked Regions


When the player selects a region it becomes active and is rendered and the others are not. 


I had all the regions stacked atop each other because I wanted to be lazy with the borders and use a bounding boxes to prevent the player from scrolling off of the side of the screen.

The movement system was cursor based. When the player would mouse over to the side of the screens the camera would pan in that direction.

The stacked regions created a problem later on and the layout changed. 

MiniMap Mocks



Started off with a plane and threw a map texture on it. 





When you select a state the regions rise and can be selected.


This was achieved by ray-casting from the camera at the mouses position then reading the selected states ID and lerping the camera to another position in world space.

 

Varroa Mite - CSIRO project.

At the start of this project I was very keen to begin but got side tracked with Tywin, a personal project that has now been completed. 
Now this project has my full attention.

During the early stages of development many different designs for the game had been thrown around both by the Client and our team. After three weeks and many meetings we were able to come up with a vision that pleased the clients expectations and was achievable in the time allocated to us by Southbank institute of Tech.

The game's vision was originally meant to play like "Plauge Inc."  but from the perspective of the Varroa mite (
which is what the client wanted). It seem's like an easy enough premise to work with and build upon but our teacher didn't like it so the concept so it changed. 

The following is my personal opinion.  At the moment the game concept is pretty bad, it doesn't seem fun at all. The concept is like a multiple choice excel spreadsheet with animations over gameplay. Needless to say I'm not a designer on the project I'm one of the programmers. I just wasn't expecting to work on a game that was so not fun. Moving on though...