Project Happy - Dev Diary 2

So it's Sunday again (actually early Monday) and where are we with project Happy?

I have been trying to plan out the rules and think about game on a higher level reading through some of The Art of Game Design again. But I haven't really nailed down the design yet, but I did get a bit more of an idea of the game.

I made a drawing of a simple landscape I could start out with:

I then did some research on making terrain in Unity and using some of the standard textures and some primitives build this little map. As you can see I went for no trees thinking it would be a pain with the camera colliding with them etc. But it turned out to be easier than I though to hide part of a tree when the camera collided with it. You can see this in the video test at the end of the post.

I then started doing a bit of modeling of the Triceratops and the Stegosaurus and after a short while I realised how nice it would be to have a three dimensional reference. And then it hit me: Dinosaur toy figurines! I went to a local euro store and for €4:50 I got these three (Yeah I know one is a velociraptor, not a Tyrannosaurus, but that was all they had for some reason).

I then got a bit sidetracked. I just wanted some simple models for the Triceratops and Stegosaurus, but I ended up basically taking the Stegosaurus to final quality because it was so fun to work on.

High resolution model:

And the low resolution model in game with normal map:

And here is how it currently plays. Basically there is no gameplay at the moment, you can just move around, and not very well. Since I'm pushing the player around with the rigid body it feels like you are controlling a rolling ball rather than a character, so I'll have to get that set up correctly. But you can get a bit of an idea and see the nice triceratops in the game and the test trees that are hiding when the camera gets to close.

Tasks for second week:

• Make the real Tyrannosaurus model.
• Make idle, walk and run animations for the T-Rex and implement them in game making the character move correctly.  
• Start looking into AI for the other dinosaurs.
• Keep working on finalizing the game design.

See you all in a week.