Day 80 of 100 [Alex_ADEdge]

Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the challenge is ending soon!

The stats as they currently stand:

Progress:

dogeDIG

Work continues with the animated voxel bat. Since the prototype in Blender worked out so well I setup the same kind of animation system in Unity. This took a bit more time than expected because I needed to rework each frame to export properly and then rework the 3 materials on the bat itself – which doesnt sound like a lot but it was a process I had to go through 8x (once per ‘frame’ of animation). So I didnt really get around to working on the code properly until day 75.

This is how it looked after day 75, there was a slight glitch with one of the frames with the code being so rudimentary and some of the importing still being broken, but otherwise it was at least working in Unity now.

Heres how it was looking a day later, much smoother and I gave the bat some basic physics.

Also worth noting at this point – I changed the camera to a perspective based camera, instead of the orthographic its been previously (see the previous gif for comparison). I knew I’d be needing to do this since I never had dogeDIG in mind as a purely 2D game and with the inclusion of the voxel bat I thought it was the best time to get that 3rd dimension really popping – which it is now! I think the perspective camera really makes everything more visually interesting, theres a lot more depth (duh) and movement to its movements. Otherwise its just going to look like pixel art! I also revamped the test area when I did this, adding materials, better shadows and a better outline around objects for an overall more polished area.

By the end of the week I’d added some movement for the bat. Theres no AI for the yet (I was flying it around myself) but all the methods are there to allow it now. I’m planning on reworking the animal AI setup I threw together for Ventureville during Ludum Dare for the basis of the creature AI in dogeDIG.

Next up for dogeDIG – Ive got to start looking at some terrain testing. The doge/design side of the game is feeling a lot more established, so now its time to prototype some digging – and once that happens all the proper elements of the game will be in motion.

Trooper

I didnt put much time into the trooper project, which mainly consisted of finishing the notes I was taking for the end of the concept phase of the tutorial series. Then it was time to dive into ZBrush, which is a completely new program to me and one Ive been wanting to get into for a few years – and I feel like Ive underestimated how complex it is! Who in the world designed the UI for this program?

Thats all for Days 71-80.