A bit of progress to report this week.
I got the movement feeling a lot smoother in general. Stopping in intersections no longer feels nearly as wonky. Though there are still a couple edge cases when you are really close to where the lines meet that I am not sure how to solve, but I have some ideas.
Look Dev
I changed the line weights and colors to look less ‘debuggy’ now that intersections are working better. Also added a nice sky box I found on the Unity store for free. I made a little particle system with stars that the player can go through. Its not….ideal just yet, but I have some ideas. I’ll need to see if I can kill and/or generate particles via code for them to work though.
I also got the spider model to rotate correctly around the lines, so it looks a lot more like actually sliding.
I showed the first deb blog to a friend and they said the current spider model looked creepy. I’m not sure I will be able to avoid that entirely, since its a spider, but I would like it to look more like Lucas than…creepy. So I made a little piece of bad concept art for a new spider person. I’m trying to base it on some vaguely African motifs to go with the Anansi theme.
I’ve started the model but I am being too perfectionist about edge flows so progress is slow.
Input Freezing
I got ‘holding down a direction to continue on the line’ working and it feels so much better. Though I wish I had some playtesters to give me some feedback. Right now if you hold down an input, lets say W for example, you will continue on the path in that direction regardless of where you then rotate the camera to. So you can rotate 180 degrees and as long as you are holding down W you will still go along the path in the same direction.
You can just just lift up W and then push it again to update which direction you are going if you decide to go on the path the opposite direction.
However, I’m wondering if this feels intuitive or not. It seems intuitive to me, but I am only one test case. I’m thinking I might want to have the freezing input thing only apply as long as the camera is not rotated passed 120 degrees from where you are going or something like that. Anyway, that is a future me problem.
Next Steps
I really want to make a shader for the lines, and I have a lot of ideas for what I want to do with them, but I can’t get Shader Forge to work on my home computer. I assume its because it has recently become Deprecated. I’ll have to figure out some alternative. I may actually need to learn shader programming, which doesn’t seem all that hard. I just really liked the node based method. Maybe I will just wait for Unity’s shader tools.
I want to try and have the new spider person model finished and skinned by my next update, so I can at least get it in the scene.
Now that movement is at a good place my next big hurtle is going to be the jump. I’m sorta daunted because with my current code I’m not really sure how to go about it. Especially for intersections. Not sure at all what will happen there.
Pirate Ferret.com 