So as my of you know a great deal of my time has been soaked up trying to create this new
FPS (First Person Shooter) video game using the Indie version of
Unity 3D. Now although I've had a few good year of creating 3D models I've never before recently had any experience with game creation. Heck I've always considered such a thing far beyond my current level of experience. But
Unity 3D does make the whole process a lot easier that I had ever thought it could be. Although trying to wrap my head around that Java Script or as many of them call it "Unity Code" is making the whole process very slow going for me.
Almost a cupple of months back now I started with
Unity 3D I had come accross the application almost by accident while doing a
Google search for something else. I downloaded
Unity 3D and toyed around with it for a few hours, tossed in some 3D models I had made just out of curiosity to see how some of my stuff might look in a game environment.
Next I had discovered a really indeapth tutorial on the
Unity 3D website for how to make an
FPS Game something I had always dreamed of doing. I followed the tutorial with what I had thrown into a game environment already, after all it kinda seemed a shame to waste what I had done. Besides I was starting to like how my landscape was kind of taking shape. After I had finished the tutorial I had a really cool grenade launcher that would shoot sphears that would explode whenever they hit anything in the game environment.
It took me a little while to figure out how I could better that but i made myself a custome grenade,
that I replaced the sphear with so now I was shooting my own custome grenade launcher with it's own custom grenade,
"How Cool is this!" I thought.
Before long I had made some special items to blow up like wooden crates that I placed inside of my Roswell - like Hangar.
Throughout my playing arround a story sort of started to take shape, and now we have
"Alien Zombie". There have been many hurdles during this whole process. One of the biggest being an FBX export issue with Max 8. You see little did I know that Max 8 was exporting my
Alien Zombies into
Unity 3D at the wrong rotation angle, so every time I tried to get my
Alien Zombies to animate, they would do it face down and look like they were
"Swimming"" rather than walking. Boy I can tell you I lost a lot of sleep over that issue.
Then there was my Muzzle flash on my machine gun was not working like the one in the
FPS Tutorial despite that I was pretty sure I had followed it to the letter. I kept gowing over it again and again and yet again, trying to solve that issue. I eventually followed an online video tutorial that was the exact same thing. I scrapped my machine gun and started from scratch with the video tutorial and it worked after that, but why it was NOT working in th first place is something I guess I'll never know. And then there were my Robots from the
FPS tutorial, everytime they played it was like they were all sort of scrunched up. As it had turned out my robot animation scale was different that what my "In Game" robot was, who would have ever thought of that. Took me a good few weeks of pure frustration to eventually figure out what was wrong there.
The month ticked by like it was made out of minutes rather than hours. I made many improvements to the parts of my project where I had a much better understanding of what was going on. Like making some new models especially for my game concept. like an Area 51 - like guard shack, Barracks, some ammo pickup, I even improved the way my grenades exploded from how they were with just the explosion from the
FPS tutorial
Now it's a seriously kick butt explosion. Man I tell you, you sure don't want to be close when one of these babies goes off because if yur too close it's instant death, and if yur within a certain range the force of the explosion will actually push you back a little. But it sure makes quick work of the baddies in the game though.
I kept wondering just how much I could put into this thing because I REALLY wanted a nice big world for people to explore. And a limit I did reach so I eventually had to break up my REALLY big landscape and make smaller sections that will eventually load as different game levels when I of course figure out how to do that.
Right now I'm mostly concentrating on the
"Farmer Bob's Homestead Level" whcu is where
Farmer Bob's house is and the ancient stone circle with a UFO hovering just above the hill top which rests the stone circle. Bob even has an old abandoned
"outhouse" around back of his house from way back in the day before indoor plumbing. I'll just bet a lot of you are thanking whatever God you believe in that you never had to endure those old time hardships eh
Better lighting and atmosphere were things to improve on next while I was still struggling with trying to fix my
"Swimming Alien Zombie" issues.
Another challenge that was a real time soaker was trying to figure out how to get my UFO to take off from the stone circle when Bob would get close to it. And even more so was how to get the UFO to have a mid air explosion that would knock the UFO off of tragectory so it crashes over on the other side of the hill range... and yes even still more, was how then to have that crashed UFO instantiate a wrecked version of itself at the crash site. Because after all I did not want Bob to just wander over to the crash site and find a wrecked UFO there for no aparant reason, especially if it was still sitting on the Stone circle hill top. But figure it out we did. You see if you just head out of Bob's house and go around the hill range there is no UFO crash, Only if you make the UFO take off by getting too close to it. and ONLy after it crashes dow a UFO appear there.... That was some fancy trick I'll tell you using something called
"animation events" in Unity 3D. Something at the time I knoew nothing about, but I sure do now after that bit of fun, fun, fun.
SUCCESS!Those troubles of
"Swimming Zombie" were finally over. As you recall I had mentioned above that, that was a REALLY big issue trying to solve that problem. And eventually with some help from the fine folks over at
"Unity Answers" I was FINALLY able to solve that problem. And all it took was to place my incorrectly rotated Alien Zombies inside of an empty game object that by default was rotated the correct way and make a new variable in my Zombie AI scripts to access the animations one level deaper. This was done by adding the variable:
var modelAnimation : Animation; which would add a new option in my inspector view to which I would drag and drop the "Alien Zombie" inside of the game object, NOT the Game Object mind you but the "Real Alien Zombie" which is a
"child" of that Game object.... sounds complicated but it actually wasn't... but who being a
"Noob" to this stuff would have ever figured that out!
Where are we now?Well much, much, much, has happened and although I still have many issues to work out with my
Alien Zombies like right now they follow me around like lost puppies not being able to do any damage to my FPS player. I've not been able to figure out how to modify my script to get that part to work properly yet. I'll be glad when I do because then afterwards or hech even now if i found an asnwere to this issue which is how to get them to avoid game obstacles. You see they are sooo stoopid that if you shoot one of them and there is one behind him, when the first one drops to the ground dead like a sack of potatoes the one in behind is more likely to get stuck behind the dead one lying on the ground... pretty much is the same for trees and rocks too. they don't have it in them right now to know how to avoid such obstacles. but they are Aware of me when I'm within range and they will come after me with their arms out stretched, which is nice and creepy for one whoe's had shale we say
"Personal Experience" I addded a cool blood effect on the screen for when my FPS player does take damage the blood opacity get more and more opaque but never fully blocks the players vision, and it will steadily decrease in opacity when health boxes are picked up.
So over all even though I'm a total
"Brain Dead Noob" when it comes to code and game creation I'm pretty blown away that in just under two moths i've managed to get my game this far.
Nuff for now. If you are REALLY diggin this then yur REALLY gonna want to follow by blog because I put a lot more info and screen captures and even video clips than I do here. I figured I'd do an entry just to let some of my followers know what I've been up to these past months
My Blog linky:
zentaiguysblog.blogspot.com/
