- \n
- I did everything in 3D, this resulted in nice graphics and was, for me personally as I was taught 3D art in school, a much faster and easier process than if I’d done stuff in 2D\/Pixel Arted.<\/li>\n
- I had the initial idea fairly quickly, just build a third person game and then throw unconventional weapons into it, this changed quickly into something more marshmallow focused when I decided to change the setting to an “in the woods” type deal and my dad suggested marshmallows. Thanks dad! (In previous Ludum Dares I had always wasted the first day trying to come with something good, not this time!)<\/li>\n
- Using Vertex coloring instead of textures saved me a lot of hassle. Totally gonna stick with this again next time!<\/li>\n
- Everything went so well I even had time to put in a small boss fight!<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n
\n<\/p>\n
The bad<\/strong><\/h1>\n
- \n
- Performance wasn’t the best for some people and the game started stuttering after a while on lower-end machines or on the web player, this was mainly due to the large amount of objects I was spawning as you throw things and zombies spawn. (The zombie spawning vending machines initially didn’t have a spawn limit!) Aside from performance being low after a while, it started off as pretty terrible on Android, my reasonably high-end Nexus 5 couldn’t even run the game at 60fps! So next time I’ll try and minimize the amount of skinned meshes too I think.<\/li>\n
- The camera was called “Horrible” multiple times. This is mainly because I was trying to go for a sort of Super Mario 64-type camera, but I realize a lot of people didn’t like that camera either, and in that game you still had SOME degree of control over it, I should’ve added something that gave you some level of control instead of just automating it all the way through. It does have controls on it but I for some reason chose to only let those work on an Xbox 360 controller.<\/li>\n
- The sounds weren’t that great. They were cobbled together in the last hour or so I worked on it, I should make more time for proper audio next time.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n
\n<\/p>\n
The (art) process<\/h1>\n
This was the first Ludum Dare I did in 3D, I’ve made countless 3D prototypes and games in the past, just never for LD or public release of some kind (yet).<\/p>\n
It started off pretty simple, I needed a character so I made a basic character<\/p>\n
![\"ss](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/ss-2015-04-18-at-09.56.38.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"ss](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/ss-2015-04-18-at-09.57.39.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n
I sort of liked the animal crossing-ness of him so I decided he was good enough for my game and made him move for a bit<\/p>\n
![\"Feel\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Feel1.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
I liked the feel I had going, but wasn’t too sure about what to do with the camera, it had to follow him, right?<\/p>\n
![\"Feel2\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Feel21.gif\")
<\/a>He’s still jumping here but I decided to scrap that as it’d make the animation system more complex and require an extra animation. :)<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
However, later, I noticed some weird flippy-ness if you went too close to it so I made it follow the character loosely position-wise, also preventing from the character moving too far away and becoming too small on screen.<\/p>\n
When I had him moving I started on a static zombie, then got some bones in him and made a quick animation like so<\/p>\n
![\"QuickAnimation2\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/QuickAnimation21.gif\")
<\/a>It’s blending between running and idle based on the magnitude of the input vector. Was super easy to set up!<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
After I had that I started messing with\u00a0the zombie, giving it bones and animating it.<\/p>\n
![\"ss](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/ss-2015-04-23-at-11.51.27.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
That sorta worked well, all he had was a walking animation but it was nice. (Later I added getting-hit and dying animations.)<\/p>\n
I figured it’d be cooler if he had some mouth movement or something so I started messing with blendshapes<\/p>\n
![\"ss](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/ss-2015-04-23-at-11.56.27.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n And then I figured, why not have the wolf blink? He is alive after all.<\/p>\n
![\"Blinkgif\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Blinkgif.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThe basic workflow for me was this:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Model thing<\/li>\n
- Put thing in Unity<\/li>\n
- If all is well, scale is right and everything, go back to Maya and start vertex coloring\u00a0it<\/li>\n
- Back and forth with Unity to check if the colors look right with the lighting<\/li>\n
- Colors right? If it’s not an animated object you can skip the rest and go straight to implementation, if not: Make his bones, but don’t skin him yet!<\/li>\n
- Think of the blend shapes you want the thing to have, they need to be applied before the skinning so they don’t override each other.<\/li>\n
- Skin the character to the bones and check if the weighting is correct, the auto skinning works pretty well usually but it always requires some small adjustments.<\/li>\n
- Animate! Don’t worry about the speed of the animations too much as they’re usually not fast\u00a0enough looking for in a game, I almost always end up speeding the animation up to some degree in Unity\/Mecanim, then again that might just be my own incompetence in animation…<\/li>\n
- Animate the blend shapes in unity! I usually find it easier to animate the values of the blend shapes in unity because it’s easier to get the timing right, here I do worry about the speed of the animation, but that might be because I can just set the fps of the animations individually.
![\":)\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\")
<\/li>\n - Automate as much as you can, animation wise! Saves on coding. For the zombies’s mouth movements I just had a basic loop in mecanim between 2 animation states, running in a separate layer on top of the base layer, on override, because blend shapes don’t override animations if you’ve implemented them before skinning the character or thing. Automation-wise I had to code in a specific random blinking part for the blinking, I might’ve looked into adding a new mecanim animation node thing for randomness but I didn’t want to waste time on such a small detail.<\/li>\n <\/ol>\n
I won’t be going into any specifics of modelling and how to use programs because there’s plenty of tutorials for that on the web, this is just my workflow!
<\/p>\n If you want to play Zombies ‘N’ Marshmallows, here’s the link:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-32\/?action=preview&uid=15287<\/a><\/p>\n \n
Tags: post-mortem<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"April 23rd, 2015 5:14 am","title":"Zombies \u2018N\u2019 Marshmallows post-mortem type dealio?"}