The fourth week of not thinking of a creative title for the blogpost!

Developement

Character

This week the character actually looks like something we imagined.

Both player moving:

Only one player moving, other one get dragged:

The mesh was already implemented the week before but it could still easily break. So we had to rotate the characters according to the rubberband (middle), so the mesh will keep looking good.

Enemies

Last week we teased some enemies and behaviours. This week we will follow on this.

[Spoiler Alert] Sorry for the art spoiler, but here is the animation linked to the wander enemy from last week.

So we connected some animations but we also went heavy on creating the actual enemy behaviour.

The first enemy we created was the ranged enemy, the slingshot kid. His behaviour look somewhat like this:

All enemies have a cone infront of them representing the view and a circle around them representing the hearing. If the character gets into those bodies the enemy gets triggered and executes his targeting behaviour. The aggro will be lost if you get far away. 

The targeting behaviour for the ranged enemies is what you can see in the gif above. He attacks and follows you when triggered but runs away when you are getting to close.

The Mob

So we had this giant mob following you around the map, giving you as sense of urgency. In production we wanted some functionallity added.

Default behaviour, normal pathfinding

Formation:

So I created this formation system but in the end... I don't know if we will use it, because zombiefied kids don't really move like this. But I guess it's nice to have.

Menu & Options

To make the game feel more complete I started maked the menu with the options shown below.

First playable level

After 4 weeks it was time to start merging everything into a playable level to get a feel of the level.

Art

We worked our environment further and started our main texture sets.

Starting with some connecting elements done we designed the vegetable garden which is a crucial part of the game.

The gates will fling open when the main character approaches, but have to immediately lock the kids out to establish the safe zone.

We started our main texture sets as well. It helps to block out the larger areas, then start with gradients, add some detail, then start unwrapping! 

Moving back and fourth between unwrapping and creating the texture has many benefits, our lazy unwrapping technique leaves a lot of room for seams and potential mistakes, that can be easily hidden.

We started creating our road system as well, so we can start finalizing the landscape and begin playtesting in our actual environment.Due to unforeseen circumstances we had to realize that we wont be able to directly use spline meshes in our game engine. So we had to devise a new way to construct our road system. We need to model it before importing it into unity, in order to achieve smooth and well defined consistence curves we used splines and Loft modifiers in max, then refined the shape. This gives us plenty of control of the roads curvature and height.

We created a 2D spline system representing the road, then defined the road's starting shape for the loft modifier in 3 different sizes: big road, medium walkway and small path.
We can control the shape of the road by adjusting the parent shape.

We can control the height and curvature of the road by adjusting the parent spline.

This allows us to map a smooth road system in 3D space and have fill control over it for later adjustments

Once this was done, we imported the meshes into Unity and started forming our landscape under it. The result was rather satisfying, a smooth road system with interesting height differences, that has an organic landscape under it.

Characters

Multiple characters are implemented and on the move!

Our annoying ranged enemy

Our athlete of the enemy team:

That's it for now!