Game Development So Far
Progress on Gym Empire this week has been great. The character assets and animation have moved on quite nicely, I was worried they would eat up a lot more time than they have. The progress however was at the cost of doing any work on the Staff behaviour and UI that I had originally planned. To sum it all up last week’s tasks were:
- Look into the complexity of creating own character assets – After weighing up my options for premade assets or creating my own, I now have a character set I am happy with that I can modify as I need for all the different character styles. So for this iteration I’m happy to put a tick in the box on this task. I’ll go into further details around my choice in a more detailed blog post.
- Modify character objects to be more modular to enable easier character changing – The first part of this task was to make some common animation components part of a generic child object that all the characters could use. Turns out the nature of animation in Unity means that the animation components need to be part of the parent. Therefore I weighed up that the overall time I was trying to save wasn’t worth the effort and decided to stick with the original design. However, I did manage to make the “discovery” of character prefabs (basically the different character styles available to use) automated, which was the second part of this task. This means that instead of adding the prefabs manually I can just drag them into the assets folder and the code will find them automatically. This makes things a lot easier when I start to expand the character set!
- Further refine staff behaviour – I didn’t attempt any progress on this.
- Add staff icons – I didn’t attempt any progress on this.
- Complete part 3 of blog series – Part 3 is now out and available to read J
Other Developments
As I suspected, introducing the new character models has solved the MatchTarget issues. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I really didn’t know what to do if that didn’t work! It’s not all perfect though. MatchTarget is clearly working now as the character moves towards the intended target, however my implementation of it leaves much to be desired and the characters perform some “interesting” movements. As a matter of fact the whole animation logic need a good going through as there are many issues starting to show.
Time Management
That leads me onto this week’s tasks:
- Refine entire animation code
- Further refine staff behaviour
- Add staff icons
- Post update to IndieDB
I’m keeping it just at that as last week I struggled to get through all my tasks and I think refining the animation code and staff behaviour could take up quite a bit of time.
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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