September 29, 2022
I’m happy to note that I have accomplished quite a bit since the last week, despite being somewhat busy with other courses. First, I have continued on the base character model from last week, adding a backpack and texturing it with a simple colour palette.
Following some tutorials, I also rigged and animated my character model (my first time doing so)! Among some of the animations are an idle animation and a run/jog animation:
I imported my base character model with the animations into Unity, which required a fair amount of Googling, as there’s quite a number of import settings for character models in Unity. Overall though, things went fairly smoothly, and after creating an AnimatorController (which was also new for me), and transitions between animation clips, I was able to get my character moving around the world fairly convincingly. I was pretty happy with this result!
Back on the progamming side, I experimenting with generating tiles using Perlin Noise (Mathf.PerlinNoise in Unity, pretty nice that it’s built-in). Overall, the result is pretty nice, with natural looking patterns of tiles, but I’m not sure at this time that the procedurally generated bodies of water and such will add much to the gameplay experience. I’ll be able to make a more informed decision on this once I have implemented the basic combat mechanics.
I got my new character models with animations into the project and starting setting up some of the UI I would need. Most of the UI in this game is going to be floating in world space, including the players’ health bars, name, and level, as pictured below. I also have my Rigidbody and Collider system now set up, with frictionless obstacles, and players properly move around without getting stuck or clipping into obstacles, so I’m glad I have a solid start on that.
Of course, the player is going to need something to attack with, so I modelled a quick wooden sword in Blender, and parented it under the hand bone in my armature in Unity. I initially had to mess with the animation for the run back in Blender, as I wasn’t concerned about the weapon parenting at that time, and it turns out the original run-cycle hand positions caused the sword to clip into the player.
