This is awfully rough around the edges, but we set a deadline of putting something out and playable today, so enjoy!
I’d love to hear feedback from anyone on what they enjoyed. Arrow keys and space:
I LOVED it! You’ve nailed the vehicle physics, best I’ve seen in a Unity game so far. Loved the tire tracks, dust and kicked up rocks. I especially appreciated how the tracks only happened when the vehicle actually was on the ground and other details. Loved how the camera switched from following to slow mo dolly during a jump, vehicle graphics are very nice, etc. etc… I could go on and on, this is awesome.
Only crit’s I can think of:
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Any way to tone down the steering response? On my 15" MBP a quick tap on an arrow still makes a pretty sharp turn. On the other hand, I guess it could be argued that this makes the game a bit more challenging.
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I see obvious popping of the smaller under-plants in the distance, but to be honest, I’ve yet to see a demo using the new Unity terrain engine that didn’t have some popping.
Very nice work Matthew, you always deliver nice stuff!
Thats a pretty solid prototype / game. I had a lot of fun ‘hooking’ the dino’s.
Only crits were the as mentioned steering response - it was incredibly sensitive on my machine. As well, maybe a longer chain and less friction when turning (for better drifting and sliding) so its easier to hook the animals and take out the boxes.
If you don’t mind me asking, how long did this take to prototype?
Cheers!
I’m sure you’ll get some ‘save the dinosaurs’ activists flaming you - oh wait, they’re extinct already!
Awesome demo - I like the jump counter - I got 140M 
Great game! The idea of dinosaur is completely great The slow-mo camera, the dust and tire tracks (btw, how did you do this? :lol: ) are awesome!
Did you use the built-in car physics, or role your own?
I’m really looking forward to the final product!
I agree with the responsiveness issue. Even on my Mac Pro I was jumping all over the place. Also when I hit a large crowd of raptors the framerate dropped fast.
Great concept tho, look forward to it.
haha that’s fun - i almost felt bad for the poor raptors… almost.
some notes:
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i found it very hard to snag a raptor without roadkilling it first (is it even possible?) - though i was able to get raptor-raptor kills which was fun.
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when dropping off a raptor, if you drive very slowly or very fast over the platform sometimes the raptor either gets stuck or disconnects - maybe snagging on a collider edge?
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IMO the chain should be much smaller - it really kills the realistic scale of everything else. if you made it that big so it wouldn’t have too many joints maybe just do a hoop-rod-hoop or kinda something like this:
http://www.valleymartialarts.com/images/gtsec.jpg
- if you back the jeep up where the terrain is steep (especially in that canyon) the camera shoots way up into the air.
i would add more crazy methods to acquire your prey. i seem to remember a long time ago didn’t you guys post a chopper version of this?
i like the concept overall, and it is quite fun already ; )
@ bronx
not sure but it looks like the tire FX from the jeep in the vehicles tut (i’m fooling around with it myself)
Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!
Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!
Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!
… just kidding! Was quite fun playing! Cool game, even though I do find it kind of brutal 
And I also agree: The steering is quite challenging, sensitive as it is…
Jashan
lol! had me laughing! good stuff and not as rough as you think. the car set up is excellent. i agree that i’d tone the steering down a touch but it’s still very good. i also thought it was cool that the player can’t get “stuck.” you always have a chain and can go pretty much anywhere. it’s always frustrating in games when you can’t go somewhere you should be able to. graphics could get pushed a bit more but overall nice job!
dr j you can swipe em - even clothesline em! classic.
my 6 year old (is it wrong?) and his 8 yr old buddy played for a while. they were having fun! had 3 on at one point. their comments echoed the steering thing and they asked… will there be a trex? what about the little guys from jurassic park? gigantosaurus? (not sure how to spell that last one but you get the idea…)
Very cool game. Instant action, instant fun. Took a while before I got my first raptor captured, and I still get more roadkill then swipes, but hey. 
Contrary to other posters, I think the steering needs to be this sharp, otherwise you don’t get the “swing-around” effect.
That was fantastic! I felt bad for the dinosaurs, though. Just minding their own business and then I come along with my ball-and-chain jeep.
Also, extra points for keeping up with recent discoveries and giving them feathers.
Yikes! No analog control?? I can’t really do anything with the arrow keys (nor does it really make sense to in a game with this kind of freedom of movement). However, I’m very glad that you gave them colorful feathers as well. I also love the triceratops skull in the back of the jeep!
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
We started with Forest’s car project for the vehicle physics: http://yogware.bluegillstudios.com/site/stuff.html . We ended doing quite a bit of modification, but it’s an excellent starting point for a raycast solution. The car is just one rigidbody; the wheels do raycasts and apply forces to the body as necessary. Unity’s WheelColliders seemed very strange, so we went this route. It took a few iterations of tuning to get the jeep to behave properly. Dampening/center of gravity/etc are changed depending if you have a chain or not, which really helped. The goal was to make it very hard to tip over, but still feel unstable enough for skill to play a role.
Other points:
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I have seen steering behave differently depending on frame rate. I’ll look into making it feel less twitchy (and probably player customizable).
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You can pick up raptors without roadkilling them first. I put in scoring an hour before we posted it, but there are actually ~15 events at the moment. Try throwing the chain’s ball at the raptors from a distance…
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We have quite a bit of optimization to do, but there are some really easy things we should be doing by aren’t. Performance should be much nicer in about a week.
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Other people have also pointed out that running down raptors is kind of cruel because they aren’t vicious enough. We intended for them to be a threat somehow, but we just didn’t have time to do any kind of attack logic for them.
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It’s hard to pin down how much time was spent on this. Most everyone in the company was working on other projects interlaced with this. We definitely accelerated recently as more people focused on it. To give you an idea, here’s what it looked like 9 days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-wAokCC_FA
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We use a similar script to the island demo to reduce the tree/foliage distance if performance is bad. On a lot of machines is probably drastically reducing the amount of detail (because there are other performance problems in the project we need to fix and the terrain takes the blame).
Since you’re trying to make the Jeep stable, I found it extremely easy to tip the Jeep. Just turning made it tip.
I tried it on both my MBP (with Intel Core Duo 2) and iMac (with Intel Core Duo). It definitely played a lot better on my faster MBP, graphics were smoother, etc. I noticed on my iMac that it also looked like at times I could see the end of the camera far clip plane.
As for steering, I also gave it a go with my gamepad, and although that helped a lot I still thought steering was a bit too responsive.
But overall I gotta say I really enjoyed it!
That is SO AWESOME!
I have a lot of feedback. First, the graphics:
It needs shadows. What we’ve done is render the trees black from the perspective of the light, project it onto the terrain, and combine it with the lightmap in photoshop.
Have you considered toon shaders?
The tops of the orange beams have an ugly ring caused by texture repetition. Set those textures to clamp.
I’d say more blur on the skidmark texture.
More dirt particles !
For some reason I imagine the spiky balls being dark instead of light. I don’t know why.
Gameplay:
Maybe you should interpolate the input more so it takes a while of pressing the arrow before you really crank it around. This is why analog sticks are nice.
Why have you gone with the classic terrain level design that has walls? I know you need to bound your world, but I would do it differently. I think a jungle with some rocky hills sticking up that you can drive on would be cool, instead of the invincible grassy walls. You could bound the world using triggers that turn on AI control of the car, etc.
A nitro that is not accessible when you have a ball out would be cool. A reason why that is like that? The nitro is a rocket engine inside the triceratops skull
Fade in between time scales ?
When you have the ball out and you press space, the camera aligns with the ball and it’s velocity. When you take your finger off space, the ball is set free and the camera tries to include the ball, the car, and any raptor it might hit in the frustum while staying behind the car like normal.
Gratuitous jumps, man made or otherwise.
Sounds like the scoring is pretty primitive right now, so I don’t really need to advise you on changing it because I bet you will. One thing I think is different scores or star ratings for the same event depending on whatever magnitude of the event you want to base it on make a lot more sense than static scores for different events.
Did I already say rocks? Rocks.
I can’t think of a good way for raptors to attack you… Maybe they should try to group up in the trees, then charge as a group and jump onto the car, maybe while flanking you. You can dump them off, but if you fail then your car is destroyed. In a related point, I think car damage would be better than the current time limit.
I love the hammerfall and nanosaur inspiration. This game is amazingly fun.
How did you make it happen? I tried plugging in a pad after the game was already running, which did not work, so I reloaded the game with the pad plugged in (no fun to wait again). That didn’t work either.
I’d give the raptors nukes, personally. 
I found it cool as well, but I’ll have to wait until the performance is a bit better on this MacBook Pro and the audio doesn’t crackle as much to comment more. The FPS was very low which inhibited steering. 
I think in general the graphics need more contrast and saturation.
Cheers,
-Jon
p.s. What are the crates for? To satisfy the every game needs crates rule? hehe
I spent a few hours on the audio crackling issue. As near as I can tell at this point it’s a Unity problem of some kind. We can bring in a loop, like a generated tone, and just play it and it’ll still hitch/crackle. Seems to only happen on MBPs too.
I didn’t do anything special. I always have my Logitech Rumblepad II plugged in to test my other apps, so when I launched it it worked. Only the left analog joystick worked BTW.