Monthly Archives: June 2017

Getting closer to being ready for vertical slice

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Here is a small video:

working GUI (not all) XP and levels, enemies losing HP and displaying it on a bar, particle effects, hit point display, portals, NPC trigger audio and text, crates have loot and you can pick it up etc

Well basically I’m still at the very very beginning of production. I’m still working on a bunch of ideas for the script (locations, dungeons, monsters, dialog), but I’m also getting closer to getting enough things ready to start making a vertical slice.

vertical slice:

A vertical slice is a portion of a game which acts as a proof of concept 

So I’m closer to actually starting the work on an actual chunk of the project. Gamedev in your spare time is a slow endeavor, I know.

Anyway I have decided I will be focusing more on the Greek mythology part of things, though I’m not going to be entirely accurate on how the tales unfolded and I’m moving more towards a story line that allows me to make my heroes count. (for obvious reasons).

 

Making a live paper doll display for the inventory

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I was working on the character, adding some items and cloth, which changed the appearance of the character. I had added a stand in render for the Inventory, which I used to place the Item slots around. Of course that was immediately outdated and the connection to the character was jarring.

So I wanted to make the paper doll in the Inventory display the items you have equipped and I didn’t want to need to handle two sets of characters wearing stuff.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply display the in-game model, which will be showing what is equipped anyway.

This was super fast to do. I just made a ‘Camera’ object that was a child of the character, changed the ‘Culling Mask’ to only render the character meshes, which I have in a separate layer named ‘Player’.
Then I created an empty ‘Material’ and a ‘Render To Texture’ asset (Right Click in the Hierarchy to quickly create them).

Finally I assigned the ‘Render to Texture’ to the ‘PaperDoll’ material and then I dropped the ‘PaperDoll’ material in the ‘PaperDoll’ Image material slot.

I also made the enemies have a Health bar display that follows them and changes how filled it is depending on the actual enemy health stats. In order to achieve this I updated the Label prefab to also include two image components, one with a normal image for the empty bar and one with an image set to fill type to ‘Filled’. I then just calculate the fill amount by doing this:

HealthDisplay.fillAmount = Health / HealthMax;

And that’s it, in just a few minutes I had two features up and running thanks to Unity. Now I added a couple of small button under the paper doll which will allow you to turn around the paper doll and I will eventually make it possible to do this with the mouse directly by clicking on the paper doll itself.