Maybe some of you remember the prototype for my little 3D jump n run that i have shown the last year. The game has evolved a fair amount since then. And i have reached another milestone. Time for a new version. The alphaversion 0.5.00 comes with ten playable levels and a somehow useful menu. As usual everything is selfmade. Code, Graphics, Music, Sound effects, Leveldesign, etc. . Development time so far: around 19 months. Projectstart was in may 2011. Unbelievable how time consuming game development can be
The game uses two external plugins. The one is the T4M Terrain system. The other is the Shadow Volumes Toolkit. I`m using Unity Free here.
Most obvious changings against the prototype: there is no shooting anymore. Alister can still kick though. Alister sees stars now when he is tipping over. Chests are not longer moveable. Too much trouble with the physics engine. But still kickable. And you can die now when your five lives are gone. There is no big penalty yet though. In the worst case you have to walk back to the level you died in. Some sound fx have changed, and lots of new sound fx have been added. Music is more or less completed too. It`s all in all a good base.
I´ve been very deep into graphics and code in the last months. So for now its time to stop for a while, to collect feedback, and to have a look at the big picture. And then to try to make the current version playable in a way that it is fun to play. Theres lots of work waiting. This is the task for the next days and weeks before i go on with further development. I have also set up a To Do page for it already to collect those points. So when you find a bug or have an idea, everything is welcome. You can of course also write it here in this thread. I´ll add it to my page then
Current Alphaversion 0.5.00 from 30.12.12. Beware! Around 120 Mb. So it may take a while to load. Click to play online with the Unity Webplayer Play Alpha 0.5.00
The same version is also available as an offline download. Rar file, 162 Mb. Download
Looks pretty nice although I haven’t been able to kill a single spider :(. It seems like the character does not always want to do the kick. How did you create the shadows when you are using Unity Free?
Thanks for the feedback. The enemies are not destroyable yet. I didn`t decide to do that, and thought i come away with undestroyable enemies, heh. But that you and many others want to destroy enemies as one of the first actions makes the decision easy. It will be implemented in a future release. I think kick and a jump onto the head will do the trick then
Added to the to do list.
That pressing alt doesn`t always perform the kick seems to be a bug. I noticed this before too. Added to the bugs section.
The shadow comes from the Shadows Volume Toolkit, a relative cheap plugin. Its not a really performant solution though. Thats why the rest of the game content comes with blob shadows or light mapping. But for the character i wanted something better fitting
My only suggestion would be that when you have a cool idea to add, try to work on it as soon as possible or at least write it down. I could give you suggestions for what I felt was wrong with it but if you adjusted it based on that you may be moving away from your vision that just hasn’t fully come to be yet. On the issue of performance though, I think it is always good to try to reduce the complexity of scripts and take whatever other steps necessary to increase the frame rate. It wasn’t slow overall but considering the simple(yet noticeably artistic) graphics, and lack of activity(animations, moving objects) that were visible at one time, it should seem that the frame rate should be higher.
Thanks for your feedback. As shown above, i already write everything down
And yes, theres still quite a bit left to optimize. Even when i have catched most of the big resource hogs already. One thing thats a real slowdowner is the volume shadow. I dont have Unity Pro, and have to use the Volume Shadow Plugin here as a real time shadow substitute. But i dont want to miss that one. Adds quite a bit to the graphics
I just tried Unity Pro and quickly reverted back. Its shadows acted strange such that when I was in a building there would be a fog-like effect with the shadow the building was casting and would be on and off based on what seemed like my distance from openings or the walls. If you know how to use them though, I’d kindly ask that you share that info with me. Also I was trying two types of motion blur. The one that came in a standard assets(pro) package made the screen “smear” horribly in a shaky manner. I think it was basically amplifying movement between frames. I also tried the trial of “easy flow” motion blur from the asset store which didn’t have the smearing problem but made a huge warped outline of the character similar to how some games make a character invisible. Also, it caused a noticeable input-lag.
