IN-CLASS DEMO PREPARATION
It’s currently Spring Break and boy am I not taking a break! With the Spring Show deadline coming up, April 1st, I’m hurrying to polish/finish several tasks on multiple projects to submit for Spring Show. Since we’re talking about my thesis here, I’ll go over what I’m currently working on and what still needs to be done after this upcoming week.
I’ve download three models, complete with rigs and animations, from Mixamo.com. I was actually very surprised that I was able to get these assets for free at such high quality. I’m very fortunate that a few friends turned me onto this website because it helped to reduce the project’s scope because I was able to simply download these assets and use them immediately on the same day. I tried to talk to a few students to get their assets imported into my project, but I needed multiple assets and their work would still have to be optimized and such in order to be game-engine ready, so it was okay. I didn’t want to add more work on my friend’s plates.
Working with Mecanim in Unity isn’t anything new, but I did have to relearn it a bit since I used it a few semesters ago. I’ve gotten a hang of it after messing with it and Googling after about two or three days, so it’s going pretty smoothly now. I’m importing the models and animations, switching the scripts from my old enemy capsule prefabs, turning these new assets into prefabs, then tweaking the scripts in order to be Mecanim friendly for each of my three enemies. It seems like I don’t even need the enemies to be NavMeshAgents anymore since I’m baking the animations into the model’s root transform in order to make the models move per animated step as opposed to having the models walk in place while being dragged forward at a constant speed.
Once I finish scripting and setting up Mecanim for my three enemies, I just have to place the enemies throughout the level and open up the entire level for the full demo. I need to tweak one specific enemy so that it drops a key when killed through spellcasting, but other than that, the player can go about their business. I need to also create a working User Interface that animates the health and mana bars when required. The enemies already have a working healthbar system.
I need to also refine the spellcasting system by possibly adding in more examples to test against for successful spellcasting. Refining how the sword and shield moves and their interaction with everything (enemies, blocking, attacking, etc.) is a priority once I go to school on Monday so I can use the hardware to test everything.
I was originally planning to have the player go inside a cave, navigate through a simple maze, and have to use BOTH controllers to summon a beast like creature to destroy something that is blocking the exit, but I don’t know if I have time for that (at least before the Spring Show deadline).
That reminds me… I reverted back to using two motion controllers as opposed to using one motion control and one navigation controller. It means that I lose a comfortable joystick for movement but gain the ability to control the shield with the left hand. It also means that I need to have enough game play with the shield in order to warrant the change. One design that I haven’t implemented is the ability to stun enemies with a ‘shield bash’. Since I have the controls the way I want them now, I need to put in more time to create a script that allows for the shield to interact with the enemies in order to stun them, interrupt any special moves, and possibly play an animation of the enemy being stunned/pushed back.