012 Finishing the Graveyard Level
Thursday 17th Jan 2019
8:05am
I’m taking my daughter to school shortly so will only have 30 mins or so before I leave. I have a few small tasks I can do in that time so I’m in the office ready to kick off the day.
9:30am
Traffic was bad this morning so got back from the school run later than expected. My first task is to quickly finish off the admin I started earlier.
10:15am
Admin done. I was updating some of the creative artwork on our website as it was a bit dated, and setting up how things appear when the site is shared on social media / linked. I also added some blurb about the company which will now appear on search engine results (mental note – I need to look into SEO at some point, as Wix is telling me there’s more I can do).
Finally I got in touch with Cambridge Comicon to enquire about exhibiting at their event this year. Fingers crossed.
And now back to finishing up the Graveyard level! Today is my last day on this level (as assigned in the roadmap) so time to get focussed!
12:30pm
Quite a short session but really productive. I modelled the wall kit in Blender and threw a texture on it too. I started with the straight wall piece so that I could texture that and have that data transfer to the other wall pieces I derive from it. I am terrible at UV Unwrapping and don’t have the patience or time to learn more about it right now, so I just use Blender’s Smart UV Project feature (Edit Mode > select all of the mesh > press U) which does a decent enough job for now.
I use Texture Paint mode to map each of the key elements (i.e. paint the bricks in pink, the rails in green) and then open up the texture in Photoshop to work on. I’m no artist but have tried to follow Ant’s art style for the game, and it’s turned out OK – certainly fine for placeholder stuff.
Once that’s done I create a right angle piece, and a ~45 degree angled piece. Once exported in Unity and setting up the materials I’m happy with how they look! I tweak a couple of minor details (made sure both ends of the straight wall were identical so they tile both ways, and increased the height of the brickwork slightly).
Time for a break now, after lunch I’ll re-make the perimeter wall with these new assets, model some lampposts, and then work on plugging the level into the game.
1:30pm
Back from lunch. We got an email from a Publisher that needs responding to so I’ll be focusing on that before getting back into dev mode.
2:25pm
OK, draft email done. That took ages. Just waiting on Ant to take a look when he’s free so we can tweak and approve before sending off.
Back to the Graveyard for walls and lampposts!
5:20pm
Slower than expected, not got the game in. But level is complete (for now, gravestones need bringing in line with art style).
Time to go get my daughter. I'll probably come back to this tonight so I don’t fall behind schedule.
7:50pm
Back in the office quickly whilst I have a moment. I’m adding box colliders to the perimeter walls before I forget to.
8:15pm
I got the colliders on the walls done. I’d set these up as prefabs so luckily only need to change a handful of game objects to cover the entire wall. I also made a start on tweaking the art style of the graves. Have to stop for a while but I’ll be back.
9:10pm
OK, back in the office and prepared to work quite late tonight to get this map done. On with the graves, and then plugging the level in!
12:40am
OK I’ve ran out of juice. Mapping down the level blocking has drained all joy from my soul. But, at least that task is officially done, which is the worst of it. It should be smooth sailing from here.
Whilst the level isn’t completely plugged in yet, I estimate it will only be another 1-2 hours of focused work to finish off.
Frustrated that I’m behind schedule with it, but comfortable that it won’t be too impactful. Oh, and I also made a new skybox for the level, complete with spooky, glowy moon.
To finish off this map I need to add; race positioning waypoints, spawn points, weapon pickups, stampedes AI route, death-pits, ambient sounds and level music. Time to get some sleep!
Adios amigos!
Signed by my face
