So this thing I’m making is my first project with Unity. I should say I’m new to coding as a thing. But I have a generally good understanding of game design (think pen, dice and paper games). So I’ve been thinking about the projects that I’d actually like to work on and following advice from a couple tutorials, I’ve identified the core mechanics they have in common, removed all the extra features those projects would have, and thought out a very simple excercise to learn how to implement those core mechanics.
From tutorials and prodding around the manual, I have a pretty good idea of how to make a lot of what I want to do, happen. Right now however there’s a few things that I simply have no idea, from a design standpoint. So what I’m going to do is layout the questions I have, and if anyone can simply tell me “I’d fix this by doing X and Y, or with Z function” I can research that and try to figure out the rest on my own. Or maybe point me to a tutorial that I’ve failed to notice on the matter, I’d appreciate so.
– So in the game you control this little blob. The blob goes around and is supposed to interact with things. Other than moving, you have one interaction button that, when pressed down, should dim the entirety of the screen displayed a few shades darker, except for the objects on screen that can be interacted with. And also contour them with a white silhouette. I figure this one can be tackled easily, but I just can’t come up with how.
– This little blob can also use inner pipes present in the house (which is the level) to travel across it. So you’d walk up to a faucet, hold down the interaction key, pick the faucet and slip in. I want the pipes to be completely transparent to the camera while you’re not in them, but when you are the entire screen should dim a little (like on the prior example). Difference is I don’t want the interactuable objects present to be stay highlighted (since I figure it’d be distracting. I want them to be dimmed as well), and I want the pipe to have that same white contour while being used. Conversely, I’d prefer the pipes not get the contour while you’re out of them and hold down the key. (I have the theory that whatever method I used to tackle the prior issue, I could just add a condition that for the script to be run, objects have to be close to the player’s Y position. But that might cause issues in itself.)
– So in this game there’s both people and animals. your blob is supposed to absorb them and then digest them to get bigger and stronger and lethal-er. Now my problem is that I don’t want to have a huge amount of full models put into the game for these characters, but I would like their models to be generated by procedure. Like instead of having modelA that has a moustache, a tshirt, ugly pants and sandals I have all those things separately, and the game just generates the character by throwing a dice a lot of times to decide what he gets to wear or not. I’m pretty sure this is possible, however googling random generated graphics (which a friend told me is the name this feature would have) does not yield what I’m looking for.
– And finally. When you absorb living things, they’re supposed to become attached to you, kind of like braindead appendages. For this there’s two scenarios. One where your total mass (you + whatever you’ve already absorbed) is bigger than what you’re taking in, and one where you’re smaller. In scenario one, the new thing you’re absorbing should be attached TO you at a random pixel in your blob’s body area, pretty much hanging from your side. And case two is the opposite, your blob should hang from a random point in the model of what you just absorbed.