I’m relatively new to unity. I’ve come to the point where I’d really like to shape up a game idea I’ve had for a while and this is the beginning. The idea is about as follows:
A completely open and non-linear universe with different planets, anomalies and 5 factions in control of those
No linear story, just a world that offers the player different possibilities to get to the goal: rule the universe
Several different ways to achieve that goal: Military, Politically or Economically
An event system that will, sometimes, create random events the player can chose to react to (some small that can be solved within seconds, some large that might force a player to change his course)
All of this will be played in a 3rd person perspective, no matter if you’re aboard your big ship, inside a small fighter fighting space battles or beaming down to a planet in order to trade, interact, do missions or fight and conquer a world.
Each faction will make decisions to attack, trade, invent or intrigue and each faction will have a couple of returning characters that will all act independently, so will the planets belonging to each faction.
The Player can hire and fire crewmembers with different jobs, trade with different times, research new items, interact with faction leaders, characters and his own crew, fight huge star cruisers, engage in space battles or ground battles, help those in need or enslave them.
That’s more or less the idea. A long way and a huge project. I’m still in the designing and “throwing ideas around” phase and I don’t expect this to be done soon or even go anywhere notably in the short future. It’s a long project.
Never the less, I thought some on this board might be interested in it (and who knows, maybe someone would even want to help - which would be great of course) hence I thought I’ll post some WIP stuff and update from time to time here.
So here’s the current state with a few screenshots and a webplayer - obviously all highly experimental and in a very, very earily stage (all content is original though). Still figuring out how it all should look and feel and play etc.
Slightly updated the dialogue script. Are characters are clones and use the exact same script for the speech options and different behavior, which will be added as a next step.
I walked around a bit. They may be clones, but you already have separate dialogues and voices for most characters. It’s a good start. Still to do: you can walk through many meshes, but you can’t walk in some spots where it seems like you should be able to, and I noticed something a bit off about the lighting:
In this scene, the shadows are going both ways! I noticed it right away because in real life that’s fairly unusual. Then I looked up and around for light sources and there was nothing that would explain this.
Yeah, there’s no colliders in place apart from walls and the floor. At all.
The two shadows is because there are also no seperate single lightsources in places. Everything is light by two opposing directional lights. Obviously, that won’t stay like that though! But as I said, the whole environment is experimental.
Restarted from scratch with how I approach the code and the modelling and started to integrate proper Lightmapping in order to rescue the framerate from dropping to hell. All objects the scenes are made of now share the same material with a huge textureatlas and can be batched while rendering. Dialoguesystem has currently been removed and the movement system has been tweaked in order to feel less bulky.
One graphical artifact that is annoying me is the vertex normal right at the top of the ear where it meets the head, it gives a nasty bright / dark spot.
It’s most noticable in screen shots 2, 3, 4 and 5 just over the ear.
Yeah! I noticed that spot above the ear too and it bugs me as well. Will need to do many many detail tweaks on all of it once I figure out how to implement it all.
I started fleshing out one map - namely the spacestation the player comes from and may return to. The area has several rooms to explore (there are only about 4 rooms left which are completely empty still) and the modelling is about 60% there I’d say.
You can move around with the WASD keys and control with your mouse.
Object colliders aren’t in place yet and the occlusion culling screws up in some moments still. But it’s still fun to walk around the spacestation even though there’s no one around but you so far.
I’ve updated the player with the first very basic battle logic I plan to implement for the ground battles. The blue guys fight on your side, the red are the opposing force.
They don’t do that much yet and look obviously strange, but it’s already a hot battle zone, hehe.
really nice mate, got lost in there lolz, and the combat is pretty fun, though if you hug a wall on the left you can shoot without worry of being hit.
graphics are pretty awesome mate, don’t like how you can walk through tables and doors though, but sure ull fix that soon enough, great work again mate.
Thanks! I corrected the UV around the ear now (it’s not perfect, but I’ll manage to adapt it when I get to final touches).
I’ve updated the player with an arena map with proper colliders and two armies of 50 (new soldiers will spawn and reinforce until the resource is depleted, which is more or less how the ground fights in the game will be handled)
Also updated the players ability to take part in the fight.
I also noticed that you can’t see the back of their collers, I guess because of the back face culling on the mesh. It might be worth modelling in some extra pollys to go down the inside of the coller.
