Back to Cylinders and Cubes

That’s a wrap on The Great Fleece as of this weekend. I worked on making up some lost time this weekend and finished up the cinematography project. I ended up baking the scene again, setting the Lightmapper setting to Progressive CPU instead of Enlightened which is deprecated. It toned down the brightness of the floor and the overall glow of anything white.

I also created a main screen with a start and quit button with a “loading” screen. It started to feel like a real game finally. I’m sure there is plenty of polishing that needs to be done to it, I will find something every time I play it. I guess that’s why there are always updates to video games. There are always bugs to be fixed and features to make better. The more you play something, the more you can find its vulnerabilities.

After finishing with The Great Fleece I am back working on a SampleScene. I’m moving around spheres, capsules and cubes again:

This time though, I feel I know so much more about how to manipulate these objects on my screen. In this snapshot I made these platforms, the green one moves from left to right. I created a CharacterController for my player, the capsule, gave it the ability to go left and right, jump and double jump. The player also collects the spheres as coins.

I had a bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to set the green platform as the parent object when the player lands on it so the player doesn’t fall off. I was of course over thinking it again as I like to do. This time though, I took a step back and simplified and came up with a fairly simple solution. The same solution that Jon showed us on the challenge review.

Right now, I’m working on having the player lose lives when it falls off of the platforms and restart the game when the players lives are down to 0.

This is all part of the 2.5D course and is just getting us prepared for what we are about to build. I’m looking forward to it, I have learned so much in the past few weeks and would like it to keep going as long as I can. I am trying to learn as much as I can in this short amount of time without sacrificing understanding for speed. I have to make sure this is all for something, I’m learning in a much different way than most people have in this industry. Once again, I’m excited to see what tomorrow will bring.