By: Allie Keats | 02 March 2018
Hard to believe we’re just about halfway there! It’s easy to see that the game is starting to shapeup. Here’s what I did this past sprint:
One of the biggest changes this week was the addition of team-based gameplay to re[Mod]. This is something we’ve been planning since last semester, and never had a chance to get around to. The idea was always to have two separate teams, an orange team and a blue team. Currently, the two teams just fight it out in a team deathmatch, but if we get the chance, we’d like to add some sort of objective for them to work towards. Ideas for this include a point-based system where capturing stage areas wins extra points, giving those objectives more weight beyond just their value for legendary parts.
Implementing team mode turned out to be simpler than I thought. One of the core tenants I kept in mind during this process was that all game logic should be fully compatible with both standard deathmatch and team deathmatch. This lead to a lot of extra “if” statements and checks, but makes the backend game logic more flexible going forward. Based on the direction provided byCharlie, our lead designer, I set it up so that teams are assigned when players connect, all friendly fire damage is ignored, and players HUDs and first- and third-person viewmodels are updated so that they appear to be on the right team.
Team gameplay is going to add a lot to re[Mod] going forward, and I’m excited to see where we can take it with the point system we’ve discussed.
Another addition that we’ve all been looking forward to adding to re[Mod] was facial animations for the character. This has a much more minor impact on gameplay than team mode, but is still something we’ve all been waiting excitedly for. Tyler, our lead artist, provided me with a sprite sheet of faces to display on the player:
Unfortunately, we quickly discovered there was no easy way to utilize this in Unity when an individual face needed to be applied to a model. We could’ve stuck a SpriteRenderer in front of the player’s face despite having a dedicated portion of the mesh and material ID for it, but that felt dirty. We could’ve split the texture into 9 different ones, but that felt wasteful. In the end, I ended up writing another custom shader that essentially acts as a SpriteRenderer but can be attached to normal meshes, as long as the sprites are evenly spaced and sized:
The rest of my time this week was spent on more minor features, like weapon part animations and giving the “Gunpedia” a facelift. The former was simply a matter of hooking up animators, and the latter was just working with Charlie to rearrange some UI elements, so nothing of a particular technical note there. Keep an eye out for the weapon part animations in future videos! They’re most noticeable on the grenade mechanism, rocket mechanism, and minigun!