Nov 23, 2021
The Great Fleece Development Recap (Part 1)
Recently I completed the 2nd project of my GamedevHQ course, The Great Fleece. Now I’d like to talk about its development a bit.
The Great Fleece Development:
I recently completed a short 3D top-down stealth game project, called The Great Fleece, as part of my current GameDevHQ course. This was a solo project in which I coded all the game systems from scratch (apart from Unity’s inbuilt Navigation system).
The 3D models were created by GameDevHQ for this course/project. The focus of this project was on learning cinematography skills. It took me around 1.5 months to develop this project, part-time.
Today I wanted to talk a bit about how the development of this game went, my thoughts about the result, and what I might do differently in future.
The Gameplay Camera:
Read this post for more specifics.
In the original brief for this project, the gameplay camera consisted of 7 different camera angles. Each would use Cinemachine to track the player character’s movement through the scene, and would switch between each depending on how far the player has progressed through the room.
While this approach didn’t do anything bad, I felt that they didn’t give enough visual range to the player when navigating the room, leading to being seen by guards that were off screen, etc.
I decided to change this 7-part design into a single continuous camera shot. But a still camera could not cover the whole room, so I used a Cinemachine Dolly Track which spans the length of the room.
A virtual camera is linked to this track, and set to always look at and follow the player. It continuously positions itself at the closest track point to the player (plus an offset of 3 to avoid looking directly down on the player). Because of how I’ve positioned the track points, and the long and narrow shape of the room, it follows the player quite well, giving a better view of the surrounding area than a static camera.
The Coin Toss Ability:
Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for details.
The players Coin Toss ability was another major gameplay element which I changed/improved upon from the brief. Originally, there was nothing in the brief about any sort of transition from the player to the target ground position. The coin just appeared there.
For a game this realistic, I thought that was pretty immersion-breaking, so I did some research on how to calculate projectile arcs in C#.
When the player activates the ability, an arc is calculated based on the player’s current position and relative hand position, as well as the targeted floor position. The output is an initial launch velocity/direction which will send the coin to the target position (provided it doesn’t hit anything mid-flight), and an array of Vector3 points which are positioned along the arc (for arc-drawing purposes).
Using this data and one of the 2 display methods I created in my 5-part post series for the ability, the coin now has a more realistic transition from the player to the target location.
I don’t want to make a long post, so I’ll end Part 1 here.
If you’d like to hear more about the systems and choices I made during the development of The Great Fleece, please read my next post, The Great Fleece Development Recap (Part 2), coming out tomorrow.
In that, I will be talking about the AI waypoint patrol system I made, as well as the player navigation system. I’ll also talk a bit about creating modular, reusable scripts in Unity.
