015 Adding Danger to Rush Hour

Tuesday 22nd Jan 2019

7:30am

Technically I started about 15 minutes ago as I was reading emails and posting to social media whilst eating breakfast. I am now in the office and ready to wrap up plugging in the Rush Hour map, which shouldn’t take more than an hour. After that I can focus on the AI for vehicles, and the moving cranes.

8:30am

Ant added some nicer signposts so I made sure those were in the final scene. The Evil Stampede control points are all plugged in – though I have spotted a potential issue with the route it will take, more on that later. I also noticed some issues with the way the road pieces were setup, so been tidying those up and making them prefabs for easier maintenance.

Off to do the school run.

Setting up the colliders on the road pieces

9:15am

Back to work, optimizing the road pieces and converting them to prefabs.

12:35pm

The level is playable now, so this was a pretty productive session, but consisted of refining things and making them work rather than moving onto the Traffic and Crane like I’d hoped.

I had finished the road sections by 9:50am, ambient sounds were in by 10:10am (I had already sourced these sounds, they were in the backlog just waiting to be edited and dropped in).

I then had to spend a while adding enviro props to match up with where the level blocking is (i.e. adding bollards, benches and trees around the edge of the route) as there were a lot of places that had no visual indication that the player couldn’t go there.

The invisible walls here will be literally that, an invisible block to the player (using a ghost perk across gaps)

So I added scaffolding to sync up with the invisible wall positions

This took about an hour to do, I then spent just under an hour adding colliders to all of the smaller props in the scene that needed them.

And finally I spent just over half an hour fixing the colliders for rooftops and bridges that were not quite marrying up.

After all that, I think (THINK) the level is considered complete. I just need to make the intro camera animations and grab screenshots for the main menu and the level is officially plugged in! I WILL get round to doing Traffic and Crane movement today!

1:40pm

Back in the office and back to plugging in Rush Hour

3:05pm

Lots of playtesting in this session, which led to even more refinement, tweaks and bugfixes. I am happy with how it feels now, I just need to amend one of the sound FX I’m using for the high street ambience (there is a ‘close’ voice in there I don’t like). Off to do the school run now, when I get back I’ll start to tackle the Crane!

4pm

Back! Straight into Blender to start preparing the Crane model for what I need.

7:15pm

I rigged the Crane, animated it and got it into Unity. I then set it up to identify when a player has entered the platform, a brief pre-movement foreshadowing period, and the movement itself. The player will become parented to the platform whilst they are on it, but can still freely move around it. This functionality is pretty much done, it took a bit of iteration and involved some tweaks to the environment to suit, but it’s feeling good!

Still got traffic to do, but I’m done for the day! I was meant to be finished with this level today, so I feel an early start coming on tomorrow to make up for lost time.

Adios amigos!

Signed by my face

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