This post is about the playtest project that I am currently working on. I wanted to share a little bit about what we have been up to so lets get down to it.
Initiation
To start things off, we created a brand new empty project in Unity, our chosen engine for this project. After the project initialisation, we set out and created a few separate scenes so that we could primarily work on features that were of our interests. A scene holding a showcase of our skills so far if you will. To ensure that we could showcase our individual skills in specific areas of game development/programming, we discussed what we were each going to implement as we didn't want to overlap another members work. For example, we didn't want to have 2 different character controllers within the same project. This brings me on to the next part.
When discussing the interests that we wanted to display, we came across a small hindrance which would prove troublesome if we didn't figure out a solution. The problem was an Input system, or character controls. A lot of our interests, as much as we were ready to start diving into the coding of, required player input. For me, I was interested in creating an interaction system which allowed the player to interact with scene objects (doors, switches, chests, etc) as well as the AI of the game.
Our simple solution to this was to work together on an input system design so that we were all able to implement the features that we needed for our work.
For the input system, we decided to use the new Unity implemented Input System 1.0.2. Due to myself not having much experience with this system, having only used the old input system in Unity, Paul took lead on this and helped us through it and explained what he had knowledge of so far. Albeit, we were very short on knowledge of the complete system and how it work, Paul knew the basics and we were able to start.
The Input System - So Far.
As we didn't exactly know what kind of controls we needed for our ideas, we decided to map out what we thought were the basic controls for most games. This included movement and looking, sprinting and jumping, and interacting and pausing.
Paul began, becoming busy implementing the controls via the new Input System. A lot of the controls currently have no function attached to them, but the basic movement, look and interact keys are working in the most simplest forms. This was good for me as we have been able to test the rudimentary interaction system that I have started to create, but that is getting ahead of myself.
We have decided to allow the player to choose between 2 different control input devices; KBM (Keyboard and Mouse) and Gamepad (Controller). Both devices will be able to use all available functions, the choice is purely preference. As you can see in the picture above, we have stuck to the 'default' input keys for the movement and look controls, using the WASD keys on keyboard for movement, the mouse movements for look direction and the left and right joysticks on the controller to affect the movement and look direction respectfully.
3D Modelling - So Far.
This part was just for aesthetics but we wanted to have some small array of models that we could use in our scenes when we were implementing our code.
Sam, being the most adept member of the team with 3D model software, has been busy creating different models in blender to use in our scenes and has currently made around 10 different models.
As you can see from the few examples above, we are starting to collect a variety of models to use.
That is it for this post, just a short one with details on a couple of things we have been working on. As always, if you would like to stay up to date, be sure to check back regularly to see if there is any news or updates regarding this project!
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