Region Bounds OLD

Boundary box for camera

Region nav.

Mini map re-sizes to bottom left hand corner of the screen when region map is selected. 

Mini Map View

Region view

Stacked Regions

When the player selects a region it becomes active and is rendered and the others are not. 

I had all the regions stacked atop each other because I wanted to be lazy with the borders and use a bounding boxes to prevent the player from scrolling off of the side of the screen.

The movement system was cursor based. When the player would mouse over to the side of the screens the camera would pan in that direction.

The stacked regions created a problem later on and the layout changed. 

MiniMap Mocks

Started off with a plane and threw a map texture on it. 

When you select a state the regions rise and can be selected.

This was achieved by ray-casting from the camera at the mouses position then reading the selected states ID and lerping the camera to another position in world space.

 

Varroa Mite - CSIRO project.

At the start of this project I was very keen to begin but got side tracked with Tywin, a personal project that has now been completed. 
Now this project has my full attention.

During the early stages of development many different designs for the game had been thrown around both by the Client and our team. After three weeks and many meetings we were able to come up with a vision that pleased the clients expectations and was achievable in the time allocated to us by Southbank institute of Tech.

The game's vision was originally meant to play like "Plauge Inc."  but from the perspective of the Varroa mite (which is what the client wanted). It seem's like an easy enough premise to work with and build upon but our teacher didn't like it so the concept so it changed. 

The following is my personal opinion.  At the moment the game concept is pretty bad, it doesn't seem fun at all. The concept is like a multiple choice excel spreadsheet with animations over gameplay. Needless to say I'm not a designer on the project I'm one of the programmers. I just wasn't expecting to work on a game that was so not fun. Moving on though...

Back on the scene.

 It's been pretty hectic with development. I've been working on two different titles now. Tywin and another game for the CSIRO. I'm about to finish my diploma as well.

Blogging kind of fell by the way side but I have been busy. I stopped working on the coding and worked on the graphics in Tywin. The game looks awesome now.

The planet textures fade from:

 Instead of:

Though I want there to be more healthy planet textures so that's my goal for tonight. There's also new levels and new mechanics. 

Uhhhggggg

  So tried >___<"

So hard but so worth it.

I created a new 3d model for the planets. They were originally 3d spheres, but after looking at the draw count and how many tri's and verts it was up dating I replaced it with a model that looks like a cookie.
Super tedious replacing all of my prefabs and updating the levels but but the games performance has improved a lot.

I also went back through my scripts and refined them and got the save game working.

There are new purple planets that exert a certain amount of acceleration onto the player altering their trajectory and new yellow rectangles that give the player a speed boost to +10.

All I need to add now is the upgrades screen, numbers on the level selection screen and make some mind-fuckery levels.  I'm thinking of hiding dark planets in some of the levels as well, if the player finds them they'll unlock new ship models (only the coolest models will be on the dark planets, thinking of a cat or something =] ) its been so hard getting this next video out because I've been so busy working on the game but you'll be pleasantly surprised when I'm finished with it. I checked out my last video I uploaded and so much has changed since then!