Week 9 - Giving Milo life

A very busy week for everyone of the design end of Haven, models where unwrapped, animations created and Milo truly started to come alive.

Texturing Milo!

Nicola spent time texturing Milo this week which which made a huge difference to him. we realized that the big eyes where defiantly working in making him much more like able. Milo was textured according to Milo's concept design with some tweaking where needed. 

Level Population & the Texture Atlas

With most models textured Nicola remapped them to use the one texture map and started bringing them into the game. we where all glad to see that the texture batching was working to reduce our draw calls. The game was starting to look better and we felt confident to present it for alpha in its current state. 

Unwrapping the ship Interior

Conor spent some time this week unwrapping the ships interior models to speed up the process for Nicola who was busy on Haven technical end. each model was unwrapped and their texture sheet and max file sent on to Nicola for texturing the following week.

Animated Poly-Art Water

Garreth spend time this week trying to implement animated poly art water using his research from the following week, sadly this did not turn out as we'd all hoped and we ultimately decided to leave it out of the final game , choosing to stick with the Unity asset Nicola had been using.

Animations

Animations are very important for our creature and Gavin worked really hard on them during the week. It is what is going to make the player engage with creature the most. These are what is going to give the creature character a personality. It is also what is going to allow the player to differentiate between emotional states ie happy, sad.

So first up we have the sad walk. This happens when the creature is walking while sad. Notice the slow movement. The creature keeps its head and tail down to portray its sadness.

Here we have the happy walk. Notice how the pace is faster than the sad walk. The creature also sways its body more while keeping its head and tail up in a happy manner. Also notice how the eyes are wide open and not sluggish like the sad walk.

This animation occurs when the player pets the animal when they have gained enough trust. This is meant to give up a happy feel towards the player. Notice how it lifts its head, closes its eyes and moves its head, similar to that of a dog or a cat when they are pet. The creature also wags its tail as a sign of happiness.

This is the neutral feed for the creature. The creature lowers its head and eats the food. There is another feed animation where the animal eats the food it prefers. In this case the creature will show a happy animation after it eats.

Floating Creature UI

Towards the end of development, when all the major elements of the game were implemented, we found the time to implement our particle effects. We felt these, while not being necessary, would add a lot to our game. We intend to use these particle effects to portray particular messages to the player. These messages can vary. One particle effect tells the player if Milo is sad, and another will tell the player if he is happy. Gareth and Nicola drew designs for these particle effects which varied according to feedback.

Conor then implemented the particle effects in Unity using the Shuriken system.  This system allows a high degree of configuration by changing the variables for physics and appearance of the system.