So the developers of Wasteland 2 are doing something that I find extremely cool (and savy smart from a business perspective).  They are outsourcing some of the artwork to the fans of the game!  Check out Inxile-Entertainment’s website for details.

If you are any good at modeling, your asset could be sold on the Unity Asset Store and featured in the production version of Wasteland 2.  Not only will this save time and money from the developer’s perspective, it puts creativity into the hands of a community with some really creative and talented people [that are untapped]!  This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.  Sony Online Entertainment launched Player Studio for games like EverQuest which dedicated players can do the very same thing for their flagship MMOs.  I don’t play EverQuest anymore, so I skipped over the opportunities here, but I do develop in Unity3D a lot…. so that got me thinking.  I enjoy modeling, so why not try my hand at creating an asset for Wasteland 2?

So, I decided to give it a go.  I’m not convinced that I can compete with the talent that’s out there, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway, because it’s something I enjoy.

I selected the turret model this week because of it’s non-organic look and lower reliance on large, well-painted textures.

Concept Art: [From Inxile's website]

Day 1: 1-2 hours of modeling the basic frame with very little detail and only half finished.

Day 2:  1 more hour of modeling to flesh out the rest of the base model and add details like wires, cables, braces, etc with basic lighting from the Unity scene Inxile provides for testing.

Inxile provides users with a Unity3D scene to test scale, lighting, and look/feel of your model, so I through the model in it’s raw form into the scene to check it out and here’s what we’ve got so far:

I have a long way to go if I’m going to make something polished in the next few days (deadline for this batch is December 13th), and texturing is not my forte, so I’ve got some practicing to do.  Stay tuned, I’ll try to post more WIP shots as I work on them.

Another 4 hours into HexTactics and I have a playable prototype build ready!

Click here or on the image below to try it out! http://redclovergames.com/blog/?page_id=565

For the technically inclined, here’s a quick list of features implemented so far:

• Basic path finding (using A* of course, thank you Aron Granberg!)
• Controllable Wizard Unit w/Fireball spell
• Collapsible bridges
• Walls and Castle structures

I think I’m going to like this project…

Alex and I decided to have a quick competition this weekend.  A mini game Jam between friends if you will, primarily involving physics based destruction in some way.  I didn’t think it was going to happen, but he decided to take the challenge, so I at least had to work on something.

So here’s what I came up with in the last 2 hours or so.  I may not have much time to work on it this weekend, but it’s fun anyway.  The concept is a Physics based Tactical RPG [turn based], played out on a hexagonal grid, with different types of units and interactive/dynamic terrain and obstacles.

Ludum Dare was really an eye opening experience for me.  I had a ton of fun and I’m getting an amazing amount of feedback from the indie gamedev community, which is fantastic!  I think as a result of the experience, I’m going to continue developing “The Wizard Apprentice” prototype into a more feature-full game.  I love doing the level and puzzle design, and dropping the assets in and playing with them is really a blast!  I’m not going to abandon HexDev, but it’s currently sitting on my back burner.

I decided to run with the concept, and fix a lot of things, keeping some of the puzzles the same, rewriting some, and adding a lot more content.  I’m probably going to rename the game, because the name is too generic and I literally decided on the name in the last 10 minutes of the competition while I was submitting my entry.

I’ve done a couple of things so far, worth mentioning, so here’s a glimpse:

• I’m revamping the way my modelling in Blender was done, so I have cleaner transitions and better control over connections like the stairwell.
• Opened up the room depth, taking full advantage of the “octagonal space” on each floor.
• Stairwells no longer require a turn halfway through (I’m not sure if this will make it harder or easier, but so far I like the new style better)
• Adding Toon-Style shading where appropriate
• Fixed some camera angle issues to give better depth perspective.  (may tweak this some more)

Lots more to come!  Stay tuned!

So this weekend, starting Saturday evening, I decided I was going to enter Ludum Dare 22 and try to hammer out a game in less than 48 hours!  Being a husband and father, I found it very difficult to actually get a lot of time spent on this, so I would say in total I had about 16 hours of committed time on this project, so all things considered, I think it was a pretty good run for it’s worth.  And it was fun!

Play: The Wizard Apprentice

Things I would have liked to do if I had the full 48 hours of dedication:

• Sound!
• Textured walls
• Animated Avatar
• Cleaner controls
• Better GUI
• More Magic (but he’s only an apprentice).

But hey, with such strict time limitations, not a whole lot you can do, so without further ado, go enjoy The Wizard Apprentice!

I found an interesting discussion on Eric Heimburg’s G+ page about “floaty numbers” in Unity, and offered to share my solution to this problem as seen in HexDev, so here it is! Maybe someone will come looking for Scrolling Combat Text in Unity and this code will help!

So to get things started, here’s a quick screenshot of the implementation in HexDev:

Concept

The basic concept is to display numbers above a unit whenever they take damage.  The number should rise for a certain height at a given speed and then poof away!  Nice and simple right?

So, to do this using my approach, we need a couple things:

1. A Prefab with a TextMesh component attached.
2. A Unit object with a MonoBehaviour attached that calls: SendMessage(“DamageTaken”, x);   where x is the number to be displayed.
3. The ScrollingCombatText behaviour below attached to the GameObject that you want to display SCT numbers.

So, Step 1) In my projects, I have created a prefab called SCTText which looks like this:

Nothing fancy, again just a GameObject that has a TextMesh object on it.  The beauty of it is that you can change this prefab to have a mesh or particles or whatever you want on it.  The number will be updated by the ScrollingCombatText script below.

For step 2, all of my units have a special behaviour attached to them that manages their health.  Whenever they take damage, they simply use the Unity SendMessage API to notify other MonoBehaviour’s attached to the game object that the unit has taken damage.  This will probably need to be tailored to your project.

And for step 3, I just attach the script below to my GameObject, give it the Prefab we defined in step 1, configure some parameters and whenever the unit takes damge, voila!  Scrolling combat text!  Here’s what the configuration of the script looks like on my units (each unit can have their own values or we can use the default values):

Code – ScrollingCombatText

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
 
public class ScrollingCombatText : MonoBehaviour
{
	// How fast will the spawned text object rise
    public float RiseRate = 4.0f;
	// How high should the spawned text object rise
    public float RiseHeight = 10.0f;
 
	// Prefab with an attached TextMesh component that will be spawned when damage is taken
    public GameObject TextPrefab = null;
 
    private List floatingTextObjects = new List();
 
	// This will be the starting height of the floating numbers
	private float initialHeight = 0.0f;
 
	// Use this for initialization
	void Start ()
    {
		// If this component is attached to a CharacterController, use the CharacterController's height attribute to set the initial height
		CharacterController charController = gameObject.GetComponent();
		if (charController != null)
			initialHeight = charController.height;
	}
 
	// Requires the GameObject to have a method call to: SendMessage("DamageTaken", int)
    void DamageTaken(int damageAmount)
    {
		// Create a new text object and set the starting height and text
        GameObject textInstance = (GameObject)Instantiate(TextPrefab);
        textInstance.transform.parent = gameObject.transform;
        textInstance.transform.localPosition = new Vector3(0, initialHeight, 0);
 
        TextMesh mesh = textInstance.GetComponent<TextMesh>();
        mesh.text = damageAmount.ToString();
 
		// Add to the list of floating text objects to update every frame
        floatingTextObjects.Add(textInstance);
    }
 
	// Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
		// Cache all text meshes to be deleted and later delete them
        List objectsToDelete = new List();
 
        foreach (GameObject floatingTextObject in floatingTextObjects)
        {
			float riseDelta = Time.deltaTime * RiseRate;
            Vector3 newPosition = new Vector3(floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.x, floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.y + riseDelta, floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.z);
            floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition = newPosition;
            floatingTextObject.transform.LookAt(floatingTextObject.transform.position + Camera.mainCamera.transform.forward);
 
			// Delete this floating text object if it exceeds our RiseHeight property
            if (floatingTextObject.transform.localPosition.y &gt;= initialHeight + RiseHeight)
            {
                objectsToDelete.Add(floatingTextObject);
            }
        }
 
        foreach (GameObject objectToDelete in objectsToDelete)
        {
            floatingTextObjects.Remove(objectToDelete);
            Destroy(objectToDelete);
        }
    }
}