Progress Presentation

Today we along with our classmates gave very short presentations on where we were with our projects. We noted our Gantt Chart, Sponsors, Music, and the car model we had obtained for our game.

In short: At this point we believe we are on track.

Concept Art

Here you can see a couple of rough concept art pages i drew up to be added to the work being created by Pat and Tim. The first is a rough visualisation of how the track could look, featuring the desert terrain, orange tape fencing, cardboard cutout spectators and plants, as well as a speaker for crowd noises. The second is a page of concepts for a few of the models, namely the speaker which is to be placed alongside the cardboard cut-out crowd members, a cardboard cut-out cactus, and a tire-wall with a logo banner strung up across its length.

Though simple in appearance, i believe these pieces offer a fairly clear picture of what i believe our game should look like, beyond this - given their very quick creation - i feel critique is unnecessary, i am happy with how they look and am comfortable that it will be understood what is being conveyed within them.

Game Design Document and Gantt Chart

The first thing to be done when working on a project like this, as is necessary for any video game project, is to create the Game Design Document, and once we were satisfied with our idea, we wasted no time in creating ours. We decided the best way to create it whilst maintaining some individuality to it was to colour code the sections of text that were our own work, though we left out some parts that weren't of any particular consequence.

As a way of gauging our progress and a means by which we could set ourselves manageable deadlines, we each created a Gantt chart for this project.

Gantt charts are a great way to improve productivity by making a project seem less daunting and allowing for better timekeeping by pre-designating said time, allowing you to focus simply on doing what needs to be done.

As you can see, a lot of what i will be doing is on the technical side of things.

I will be working on a lot of the Unity/game-engine side of things, with my main tasks being to create a working, drivable car, and to create the single track that we will be including in our game.

[UPDATE: 15/06/13]: I feel it is worth noting that i have been assigned the task of performing a final check on our Game-Design Document for spelling and grammar. I have done this, reading through the entire thing, adjusting the formatting where necessary and even re-wording the parts written by my teammates (though this does not include the more personal sections towards the beginning of the document.)

Research - Arcades

Today we visited an arcade to do a bit of research into what the most prominent aspects of arcade racers are. We played standard racers like Outrun 2, and rally games like Sega Rally 3.

The most common things I noted were:
- Bright, colourful environments and UI's
- Fast-paced, up-beat music
- Timed selection menus

Research - Terrain Creation

When looking into terrains i decided my first port of call should naturally be the Unity documentation for it, finding in the end that this was all i would need.

See the page in question here.

The first section titled 'Using Terrains' covers the basics of terrain creation and manipulation. It reveals that terrains are effectively flat canvases upon which you 'paint' hills and cliffs and whatever else you require for your environment. You have a selection of brushes similar to those you might find when working with Adobe's Photoshop, and again in a similar fashion you have variable brush size and an 'opacity' which as you may expect affects the severity of the brushes impact on the terrain mesh. I was curious as to weather this tool could be used with a Graphics Tablet, but did not have the means to find out unfortunately.

The later sections cover more specific functions of the terrain tool.

'Height', offering a fairly ambiguous suggestion of its contents through its title, covers the different functions available for manipulating the height of the terrain mesh. Offered to you are the simple ability to raise and lower terrain, as well as more interesting abilities such as terrain smoothing, and raising or lowering to a specified height, allowing you to create flat levelled cliffs like those seen in the image below (taken directly from the guide.)

'Terrain Textures' covers not only the application of textures to a terrain mesh, but also the ability to include and blend multiple textures on a single mesh, a very useful function. Making use of the blending function is as simple as it is to create the terrain itself, you simply need to add your different terrain textures then 'paint' them on as you see fit.

'Trees', 'Grass', and 'Detail Meshes' all cover the addition of models to a terrain mesh. In keeping with the simplicity that the terrain tool offers, all of these functions allow you to 'paint' the different models directly on to the terrain mesh. In this instance the tool goes further to save you time by randomly varying these models scale and position, creating a varied environment with only a few models. While this is very useful for large environments, i could see it causing potential problems in more focussed experiences where level design needs to be very deliberate to maintain a games pace/difficulty.

'Lightmaps' covers just what it says. Lightmapping your environments can be a great way to improve the performance of your game whilst maintaining visual quality.

'Other' details the extra settings that are available in the terrain tool. These are mostly performance related settings such as the draw distance for various aspects of the terrain mesh. Also included, however are settings for the 'Wind', which adds some movement to an otherwise static environment by allowing for Grass models to be deformed or bent as if being affected by a breeze.

In summary, i will say that the terrain tool seems like it will be perfect for our needs. Our intention is to create track tile models and build up the terrain around them so that they blend in, and making use of the various model-placement functions should make the whole track creation process a lot easier, not to mention faster.

Research - More Unity Car Setup's

Edy’s Vehicle Physics

I stumbled across this whilst searching for another Unity-Based car set-up, and while it is utterly fantastic, i feel it is a little too much for our game, we want it to be an arcadey rally game rather than a realistic one, hence why i decided against using it. On top of this is the fact that it is a paid project.



Unity Racing Kit

Another pre-made Unity car set-up that shows just how much you can accomplish with this engine. It comes with a bucketload of excellent features for creating a racing game but sadly, again, this kit is a paid project.

After searching through various other resources i have come to the decision to go ahead and use the Unity Car Tutorial set-up from my last post, despite it's shortcomings (which i intend to try and fix if i have the time.)