1 - A Soggy Apocalypse

Hi! Welcome to my first DevBlog post. I'm hoping to keep this informative but not like a tutorial (there are lots of much better ones, trust me), and detailed but still fun. A fine balancing act but I think I can get there if you bear with me for a couple of posts.

So chill out, get comfy, and let's get started.

Basic Concept - Audio and Aliens

The simple plan when I first sat at my computer and created my first Unity project (if you don't count the ones I made following the fantastic online learning materials) was to build something that would allow me to experiment with audio implementation principles and have some fun with different methods. To do this, I knew I was going to need some fine looking, eye catching, three dimensional assets. So I hopped on the Unity Asset Store and browsed by 'Free'.

Since I didn't really know how much of an undertaking this would be when I started, my first line of action was just to download a bunch of stuff that looked like it would fit together.

In doing this I picked up this fantastic package called Flooded Grounds by Sandro T (you can find their store page here). It's a collection of detailed but low poly assets, filled with modules from which beautifully dilapidated buildings can be created, as well as some lovely trees and other cool stuff. The example scene was perfect for my purposes; self contained, varied, and could run on my MacBook. This really set the tone for my future plans with the project - it would be something spooky and post apocalyptic, everything else would be decided later. Here are a few pictures so you can get the gist:

Getting Moving

The player object that this scene came with was decent enough, but pretty bare bones. No jump, sprint, and it struggled going uphill. It was simple enough getting these fixed looking back now, but as a complete beginner to Unity and having only dealt with movement by gameObject.transform-ing stuff about and off into the distance, it took longer than it should have.

I initially used a rigidbody and .addForce() to get my player around, around slightly faster when they sprinted, and in the air when they wanted to jump - fine.

A Different Perspective

Next I set about getting a third person camera set up. I like the first person perspective for horror games as it can make the experience more immersive if the player sees the world through the characters eyes. However, I realised though that if I had a character the player could see, I would get to record and design some cool movement and rustle noises as well as a bit of character audio and maybe even some dialogue.

A day or so later I had a script that would rotate the camera around the player and impart its forward direction on a nested object of the player character named Orientation. Then my player movement script would take the input values from the user and modify them with transform values from orientation, meaning that forward motion to the player object is always whichever direction the camera is pointing.

Now that the player could see themselves, it was time to get a cool new character model. After a bit of looking I found this beautifully detailed asset from a short film called Adam, made by Unity in their own engine. It was rugged, weird and a little bit creepy - a perfect fit for my project.

He even came with a specially rigged animation that made him limp forward and look about in a dazed manner. It wasn't too difficult to get this to play when the character moved with the Animator component, and ta-da! A (partially) animated player character!

Set-Dressing

Now that I could move about in this world, I decided that there were far to many UFO's cluttering up the sky. I have this cool vision of a couple hiding up in the fog, occasionally flashing lights and making otherworldly noises, a bit like the fog-horn noise the Tripods make in War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise one). I also removed the built-in post-processing script that the package came with - it was brilliant but my laptop was struggling with it a bit. Using the default unity fog gave me control over the density fog density and algorithm, allowing me to tweak it to make it much more claustrophobic. This had a cool effect but by default a Camera in Unity will never render fog over the top of a skybox, leading to this strange situation.

A 1x1 kilometer inverted box over the camera to occlude the skybox and we get this!

Much more foreboding. The window reflections in the background are still an issue I'm having with the rendering, but I can fix that later.

Summary

A pretty good start! We're still not completely caught up yet, but I don't want to put too much in one post. They won't normally be this long - hopefully I was able to get

through it all without rambling too much.

The next post should have some stuff about getting the character animated a bit more thoroughly, fixing issues with movement, and discussing ideas on where to take the game.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!