BIG VEGAS AT LARGE
Top Down Shooter
ROOT MOTION
The character moves using root motion and always faces towards the mouse. A blend tree is used to select which animation to used based on where the pawn is facing and what direction the player is inputting. Holding the crouch button will lower the player's hit box and switch to a new blend tree with all of the crouch animations. The animations control the direction and speed at which the player moves.
WEAPON AND POWERUPS
The player's health bar drains when taking damage. Grabbing the health pickup will refill it. Grabbing a new weapon replaces your current one, each weapon having a different bullet spread, damage, and shot speed. The disco ball is a special weapon that gives the player one shot that fires in all directions and then switches them back to their previous weapon. Each weapon has a different right and left inverse kinematic position to tell the hands where to go when it's equipped.
ENEMIES
Enemies use the Nav Mesh to path find. Once they're within range, they will start shooting the player. If the player moves out of range, they'll go back to the chase state. Enemies use the same root motion movement and IK hand positions for different weapons as the player. On death, the AI will ragdoll, drop an item, and then get destroyed after a short period of time.
UI
The UI displays the player's life count and current weapon in the top left corner. Pausing the game sets the time scale to 0, so everything freezes. You can quit to the main menu or access the setting from the pause menu. The settings can change the volume, resolution, and other quality settings.
Big Vegas at Large
Big Vegas at Large
BigVegasAtLarge Milestone 1
BigVegasAtLargeMilestone 2
BigVegasAtLargeMilestone 3
BigVegasAtLarge Milestone 4
POST MORTEM
What Went Right:
This class was very eye opening for all the things you can do in the engine rather than just scripts. Ragdoll physics and root motion seem like very intimidating things to work with, but I got the hang of it after using it in this project. Another thing I got experience with was using UI. One of my favorite parts of the project is how I did the player lives and weapon UI. I instantiated a model of the weapon under the map along with the player model and put a rotation script on both of them. I put a camera in front of them to capture just the one model and then used it for a raw image on the UI. This was inspired by old N64 games like Banjo-Kazooie that uses rotating 3D objects for the UI rather than 2D sprites. The last thing that went right was being able to keep up in class. I learned better through doing things then just reading or studying, so seeing a live example in class and doing it as we go along definitely help me take in the material a lot more. This also worked out well for HW, because I would have most of the milestone done by the time it was due, so I got to put extra time into polishing some areas or working on extra parts of the game.
What Went Wrong:
Some parts of animation were very tedious. This includes making sure each different movement animation moves straight in the direction it's supposed to go, and setting up events during each foot step to play a sound on all animations. It's easy to experience burn out from the tedious nature of this kind of work, but it's important to understand that part of making games is this kind of work and that you still have to get it done. One thing that was a struggle to deal with was my One Shot weapons. The idea was that it shoots once and then switches you to your previous gun. I had a lot of issues with this, like when the previous gun was destroyed I'd get a missing reference error, the gun destroying its self causing issues, or if the previous weapon was a one shot weapon then it would stack. It took a lot of bug testing to find what parts of it we're breaking different parts of the game, which took up a lot of time for the project. I had difficulty with fixing the games frame rate to run better. The game is really small, so it would never actually have any issues with frame rate, but if it were to actually have issues I would have trouble with it. I tried setting up the occlusion culling, but there was a lot of different things to take in with it and I wasn't really sure what I was doing for my first time with it. Optimizing the game probably isn't the most fun part to work with, but it's a marketable skill that I'd definitely like to get better at.
Take Aways:
One thing to take away is how powerful the engine can be depending on how much you know about it. Setting up ragdoll physics for the AI was as simple as just plugging a couple of parts of the model into a premade Unity system and the rest was just telling it to turn on and off with code. This small bit of polish can add a lot to a game, and some people even make games entirely based off of ragdoll physics. Another useful skill I gained was being able to make code with single purposes and maximum re-usability. I used spawns for players, AI, and pickup items. I used the rotate script for pickup items and UI. Lastly I got experience with parts of games that I don't usually work on. Setting up audio, having settings menus, having a pause button and pause screen, along with saving things to player prefs is something I've never done before, do is great for adding a level of completeness that a lot of beginner level projects lack.