Man on fire

My brother has been working for a while on a better model for us to use while testing animations. Upon importing this model into Unity, my brother insisted that I make it catch fire. Five minutes later, this is what we had. Any demonic overtones are purely coincidental.

Building a world

I've given plenty of props to Unity so far, but even a great engine is only as good as the content you feed it. To create content for a game, you obviously need tools for 3D modeling, animation, texturing, and music/sound editing. Thankfully, there are quite a few options out there even for people operating with a limited budget.

For 3D, I had been leaning toward Blender, since it's free and includes an impressive list of features. It also has a big time learning curve and an unconventional interface.

I recently picked up a copy of Cheetah3D, however, which is very reasonably priced and offers nearly every feature I need: first-class modeling tools, skeletal animation, UV mapping, 3D texture painting, and, in the most recent beta, light mapping. The user interface is a snap to learn as well, and objects created in Cheetah can be imported seamlessly into Unity.

I'm getting to the point now where I will need to begin churning out content and building the game world. Efficiency is paramount for a small shop, so tools like Unity and Cheetah can make a daunting task much more manageable.

My next post will talk about some design decisions required to set up a real-time battle system.

In Blizzard's shadow

Hello, my name is Ben. It has been one year, five months since I last played World of Warcraft. I am proud of my resistance to the temptations that keep tugging at me, like The Burning Crusade, the fact that all my friends and family still play, and the peer pressure brought on by the Scroll of Resurrection.

Despite my resilience heretofore, I find it hard to escape the shadow of WoW that looms over my game. This is particularly obvious in my control scheme. Left click to look around your character. Right click to turn him. Scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Some of these are standard features of PC RPG controls, but I find that as I refine the controls, almost all my decisions are made by furrowing my brow and trying to conjure memories of how they did it in WoW.

As you might imagine, this is cause for concern. The easy thing would be to grab The Burning Crusade free trial from my bookshelf and fire up my old account. (I stood over the trash can for a minute after receiving said free trial but could not bring myself to toss it. Now it just watches me work.)

No, the right thing to do is mimic the intuitive parts of the WoW control scheme then try to improve on the frustrating bits. I don't want my game to look or feel like WoW, but genre is a useful thing and must be acknowledged, even as it relates to keyboard input.

Now if I could just remember those frustrating bits...

A sneak peek

One of the coolest things about Unity is its Web player plugin. It's the same idea as the Flash Player, but it renders amazing 3D graphics instead. Pretty cool.

As a way to test out how well I will be able to embed builds of my game into this blog, I'm posting here some of the progress on my battle system. It's not much at first glance, but there really is quite a lot of depth to it. Here are some nuances to look out for:

• The way blue box man's left leg twitches when he runs.
• The fireworks that go off when he lands a Super Attack (press "2" to execute one--you'll love it).
• The way he runs forward while moving backward.
• The glorious piece of weaponry that blue box man and red box man are both carrying.
• The way the camera gets stuck above blue box man's head when you zoom in too far (using the scroll wheel).

Here are the controls. (You need to download the Unity Web player to play the game.)

• Right mouse to enter full screen mode (highly recommended--some of the controls don't work too well otherwise).
• Click on an object to target it.
• Left mouse: look around
• Right mouse (in full screen mode): turn
• Scroll wheel: zoom in and out
• w, s: forward and backward
• a, d: turn left and right
• q, e: strafe left and right
• 1: attack
• 2: super attack
• 3: cure
• 4: spell

Oh, for a space helmet

I played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the first time tonight. Aside from the usual "wow, this is really cool" effect of playing Wii games, two main things about the user interface struck me as very well done.

• First, the controls (of course). The running, aiming and shooting action all take some getting used to, but there are some very nice touches, like moving the wiimote toward and away from the screen to activate a door lock.
• The heads up display (HUD) is also really nice. Samus Aran of course wears a nifty space helmet, and the HUD actually looks like a visual overlay from inside her helmet. So instead of information sitting on the screen in some sort of omniscient way, it really looks like you're seeing only what she would see. It's also possible to make out the faintest reflection of Samus' eyes in the HUD, which is a brilliant detail.
  

Ok, so the controls and HUD basically make up the whole user interface, but the sense of immersion is almost immediate and breaks rarely (most notably when she rolls into that little ball).

This of course leaves me wondering how to improve immersion in an RPG-type game. Standard RPG controls and HUDs hardly make sense at all, actually. How do you know how many health and magic points your target has? What do menus and hotkey bars have to do with making decisions in a real battle?

One answer is that the objective is different in FPS games than RPGs. FPS's rely on first-person perspective and a direct connection between player and avatar. Often the in-game character's face is never visible. RPG UI tends to be much more akin to omnicient third-person perspective in a novel, where the player assumes a god-like control of characters' actions. Maybe these two kinds of perspective are just there for different reasons, to facilitate a different kind of immersion.

This to me seems like an easy out for RPG developers. I think most of the time the quality of immersion (and story telling) takes a back seat to the goal-oriented "game" aspect of things (why else would you need to see a number flash on screen every time you deal damage?). Some would say that's the way it should be, but I'm not so sure.

So how do you combine the best of both worlds? I'm not sure yet, but my best idea so far is to have all my characters wear space helmets.