Spent the afternoon playing with Blender modeling the environment I sketched out in my last post. It’s pretty primitive and probably took me way too long, but that’s fine – this is what I wanted to spend my time doing this jam, getting more practice at the 3D side of things.  Some things I’ve realized I have no idea how to do correctly:

• Choosing a scale for the game to work at and making sure both Unity and Blender agree.  If there’s a strategy to this, I’d love some pointers.  In general, I modeled what I wanted in Blender, imported it into Unity, then compared it to a 1×1 cube as a reference for a character’s size and adjusted the environment model’s scale to match.  Still, a lot of fiddling and magic numbers and I have no idea where this is going to bite me down the road.
• Related to the first point, until I get the game itself up and running, I’ll have no idea if the distances between houses and other objects are realistic and playable.  I’m terrified of finding that everything is too far apart and I need to modify the whole environment to fix it.  I’ll need to look at how to break the environment up into pieces to place more modularly from withint Unity down the road.
• Optimizing the model, making sure there aren’t any hidden faces, making sure all my normals are good, etc.  I’m sure there are a bunch of tools in Blender to help out with this but I don’t have the time to look into them right now so I’m plowing ahead with my crappy first-run models.
• Lighting in Unity has always seemed like a black art to me.  With one directional light, realtime shadows and light-mapping both seem to have weird spots that are brighter than they should be.  Shadow’s usually look jaggy and hard no matter what knobs I play with.  More magic numbers to fiddle with and I don’t have time during the jam, but I’ll come back and take a look at this after other stuff is finished.

Here’s the greyboxed environment pulled into Unity.  Next up, the character model.

Tags: gamejams, ld25