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design Development Games General OneGameaMonth

Dev Update – wk3 – sacrifice & surprises

Things are going pretty well.  The uncompleted ‘minimum required features’ list for the January Version is getting very small.

  • Corner pillars at outside corners
  • Fixing wizard shooting and movement (aka the Big thing)
  • Death effects and sounds etc.
  • Spider jump attack

Particles!

New stuff added this week:

  • Restart Button, Exit game button.
  • Bolt Particles and light removal.
  • Bug fixes with spider corpses falling out of the world
  • Jucifying impacts on monsters & spawners

Now as to sacrifice…. 

Well you get what you pay for… and that’s the problem with using Unity 3D free version… It’s looking like I really Really need deferred lighting to make the wiz-bang light effects on the wizard’s magic bolts.  In Unity Free I can only force a small number of lights to be precise. after a few they default to vertex lighting, which causes the odd lighting issues on the floor that we saw in last week’s build.

So, I had to remove the lights. and am replacing them with some particles effects for now.  Maybe someday the $1,500 unity pro fee will be accessible to me but for now it’s utterly beyond my budget.  (There is the 75/mo option, but even that seems excessive.. and at month 13, you don’t own anything unless you keep paying.)

So far that’s the biggest hurdle that I’m running into, but no doubt there’s going to be more design sacrifices due to inaccessible features.

Which leads to the surprise of the week.

Well… surprise for me.. nothing in-game yet… but Shader Forge came out which promises to have all sorts of benefits as soon as I figure out how to fully take advantage of it.  (In related news… I don’t ‘get’ shaders yet… working on it..)

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