Weekly Development (Colter Hasfurter)
Week 1-2: 8/28-9/11
Bug Game (cut)
The first two weeks, we were going with Amanda's "Bug game" at the start. At this time, the team and I brainstormed on the bugs, the gameplay, and how the story would play out for her game. However, as the next class period started to approach, that was when Jeremy decided that this game idea might be too complicated to attempt over the course of two semesters and we ended up switching over to the Hell Racers idea.
Week 3-4: 9/11-9/25
Hell Racers Brainstorming
During these two weeks, Jeremy introduced his idea to the group to make a backwards race. Basically, a car race where the player has to come in last place to win. It was during this week that the group and I brainstormed on what the story is, and how the game-play would go down such as power-ups and having the car automatically race down the track while giving the player limited control of the car to do actions like jumping, moving left/right and activating power-ups. We officially decided that the game program we would be using to make the Hell Racers would be Unity.
Week 5-6: 9/25-10/9
Learning Unity and Car Tutorial
During these two weeks, I spent my free time learning the Unity kit to work on the game in the future. Some things were a bit tricky like it taking me forever to realize that there was a difference between the game-screen and development screen. I didn't realize that you couldn't work on the Unity project if you didn't have the development tab open. Since I was planning to work on Hell Racers level, I also took this time to get use to the terrain tools. Jeremy also helped showing me a brief tutorial himself on how to work some of the terrain functions. Also, it is here that Jeremy showed the group a tutorial he found which ended up being the tutorial we would use to start off work on the game. It was brief, but I looked around in this tutorial just to see what was up; like seeing how the script worked for the cars and other minor details like how the cars automatically moved along the track.
Week 7-8: 10/9-10/23
Attempted to Help With Hell Racer's Programming
For these two weeks, I was still getting used to Unity, but I decided to attempt the programming aspect of the game. I decided I'd give it a go to try to help Greg with the coding instead of dumping this part of the game's development all on him. The very first objective we had to get done for the programming was to get the player car to automatically move along the track. It took awhile, because I didn't realize that I had to connect the player car to the way-points as well after copying the code of the AI cars into the player car. However, to get the player car to move on its own, I had to get rid of the player movement going left/right (which Greg fixed). After getting the AI working on the player car, I then attempted to add jumping to the car. The farthest I could get here was to make it so that when the player presses space-bar, the car would go up. However, I couldn't make it so that the car would only rise once, and briefly, when the space-bar was pressed (again, fixed by Greg).
Week 9-10: 10/23-11/6
Built the Hell Racer Basic Environment
Here, I started to finally get to work on the game's level in Unity. The world the group decided on was to have three sections: the heaven level, the transition level, and the hell level. After creating a terrain-plane, I fit as much as I could on it. To start, I split the terrain into three sections, the heaven area is a green grassy area in one corner, the transition area goes along one of the edges colored in black, and the hell area, using an ash texture, went along the other corner. I then leveled and moved around the terrain so that each of the three areas are lower then the one that comes before it so that there's an illusion that your going downward in the world once the track was implemented. However, I did come across a few rough patches. For once, I couldn't scale or rotate the terrain. Because of the idea of having 3 separate worlds, the 3 levels come off small on the terrain because I couldn't scale it. As for rotating, I figured that I could just make a sky-box for the heaven world, but I was hoping that I could rotate another terrain plane so that I could then work downward to create a ceiling for the hell and transition areas, but the Unity engine just wouldn't allow it.
Basic 3 world textures
Afterwards, I then overlapped a few other terrain planes with the primary plane so that I could get more walls, water, and hills up without having to lose some of the much needed area of the original terrain plane. I did what I could to try to hide the cracks that split the terrain pieces from each other.
Overlapping terrains to create walls/hills
Week 11-12: 11/6-11/20
Basic Track Workings
These two weeks were kinda slow for me. I used this week to understand how to get the track of Hell Racers working. I uploaded an non-textured road piece into unity and worked off of that to learn the basics of the way-point track. I copy-and pasted a few of the road pieces to make a straight road that goes over the river. I then moved the already established cars, and movement way-points, to the newly created road and set them the way-points up so that the car goes along the road, and then played around with the way-points after the road to see how the car goes about on the environment. The one hiccup I had was that the car would actually fall through the road pieces at first because they didn't have collision. After about one to two hours, I finally realized that it was because they didn't have collision applied to them and finally got that fixed by adding the collision modifier to each road piece.
Week 13-14: 11/20-12/4
Built the Track
For the final weeks, my primary objective was to finally get the track implemented for the game prototype. Using track pieces that were developed by the team, I went into 3ds Max (2014) and implemented the road textures that were also created for these pieces. After applying the texture to a good amount of the road pieces, I then uploaded, and scaled, said pieces into Unity so that I would have original pieces to work with as I built the track.
Original Track Sketch
Completed prototype track
I wasn't too sure if my original track picture would work with these pieces as I didn't think the turns would fit on a terrain plane that was kinda small; especially in the transition area so I basically just build the track on the go and stuck with what I thought made for a good track. However, when I got to the hell section, I decided that I wanted there to be a big drop at the transition from the black to ash transition, and then wanted the track to go all the way around the edge of the hell area; and then end it with a long track that falls into the lava pit. After completing the track, there's a few visual hiccups from where I didn't connect the track pieces fully, but not to the point that it messes the car up if it drives over it. Hopefully when I get back to it, I can use the "snap-to-grid" function, which I didn't use originally, to fix this completely.
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