Arvutigraafika projekt 2018/19 sügis

Queen Aerisilium

Silver Kirotar (What is that person doing here, though?)

Introduction

The goal of taking this course is to get some motivation and support for continuing with my RTS on platforms project. Queen Aerisilium is currently a boring, ugly and featureless 2D game. The plan is to change that during this course. The idea of the game came to me last September or October, I do not remember. I started the practical work of it somewhere around this January.

Description

The game, Queen Aerisilium is an RTS game, where the characters and buildings stand on floating islands. The idea is that the player could decide, where to expand their colonies, make new colonies, gather remote resources and etc. The more islands a player connects, the easier it will be for them to move around their characters, but also it will make defending their base from their enemies more difficult.

The main difference between most RTS games and this game is that the game is viewed from the side and all of the areas where the actual gameplay takes place are not connected at first (see Driftland).

Work that is intended to be done during this course (..these courses)

First of all, since it is a computer graphics project after all, I will try to add some 3D elements into the game, thus changing the game to 2.5D. Then we will see how things will start working out, and I will probably have to decide if I shall but the main focus on designing the graphical part of the game, or continue on the programming and adding some gameplay. For the latter part, I am really going to need to develop an AI or at least add the multiplayer support.

Secondly, as mentioned before, I will do some programming and add something more to the gameplay. Of course there will be multiple useless and some less than totally useless features added into the game.

Finally, since I do not have any music or animations in the game, I should add something here as well for the ease of conducting the presentation at the end of the course. Currently players get minimal output from the game itself, even though they have multiple interactions in the game, in other words, the project has yet to reach the status of being a game.

About to be.. Required technologies

• Unity game engine
• Blender
• Audacity???
• StackOverFlow ;)

Foreseen difficulties

• Lack of creativity - this problem cannot be solved using known humane approaches.
• Lack of skill - should these kinds of problems arise, I will go poking these wonderful people who are also taking the CGP course, and especially, Raimond himself.
• Lack of time - this problem can be reduced by getting proper sleep and being physically more active. The main problems here are procrastination and unintentionally playing incorrect video games, in other words, games that are not of RTS or Platformer genre.
• Over-engineering the codebase with strange or unnecessary patterns - this has been the main problem since the beginning of this project, trying to make everything easily scalable, while maintaining the efficiency.
• Overthinking simple features - Ya, that is an actual possibility.

Keywords for similar games (totally did not copy-paste them from the previous plan): Driftland: The Magic Revival, Clonk, Swords & Soldiers, (Side-view) Side-scrolling RTS, (Platformer) Platform RTS

DO NOT OPEN (older versions)

Milestone 1 (28.09)

• Create and add first 3D objects into the game (a house and an island would be nice).
  • Images
• Read through the code and identify what needs to be rewritten.
  • Found 5 (out of 48) classes that require some level of refactoring.
    • 2 of those classes (~300 lines each) are quite difficult to read.
      • Selection Controller - controls selecting units, buildings and resources: current idea is to separate them.
      • Bridge Constructor - since I'm going to use 3D bridges in the future, I should separate the main logic from the "frontend logic".
    • Otherwise code looks fine, currently thinking of refactoring the names and namespaces of the classes. (Not going to waste too much time for it, probably will take about 30 minutes)

Milestone 2 (19.10)

• Some logic for rotating the platforms or something?? - So it would be understandable that the game is using 3D graphics.
• Modelling and fun: Images
  • Add more color to the 3D objects.
  • At least one additional (something from the current 2D objects in the game) 3D object.

Milestone 3 (02.11)

• Fix the logic for selecting and moving (and assigning) units. (for 3D space, etc.)
  • ('Old' 2D box collider do not work in perspective view.)

Milestone 4 (16.11)

• Make a second house (The villager house/main house/town center).
• Add bananas to the palm.
• Find out (and fix) why the units z axis is overwritten by zero every frame.

Minor fixes:

• Scaled characters down -> scale WAS set to 1 after flipping the character
• New standard unity shader without backface culling (CULL OFF)
• Materials that needed to be without backface culling
• Fixed zoom for perspective camera (using FOV)

Milestone 5 (30.11)

• 3D model for tree
• Vertex paint on tree and palm for visualising wind
• Raimond has suggested me to use a degrading material for bananas. (Best) Figure out how to find loose parts in a mesh OR (Acceptable) make all the bananas as separate game objects
• Shader that uses vertex paint for visualising wind (best if considers rotation)

Milestone 6 (14.12)

• Make the houses look a bit more appealing
• Model and add 3D bridges
• Map each banana to a pixel and apply degradation

Project Demo (21.12)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0c0ji0he4hvlujm/2018-12-21_04-00-03.mp4?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0g9yi23c91pjgw2/2018-12-21_04-02-44.mp4?dl=0

• Final Build