Gael Mauleon

The scavengers ships will need to harvest metal from the ground in specific places on the map. So I decided to work a bit on the pathfinding last week-end. Here is a little video that shows what I came up with. The red line is the path and the blue crosses are the different waypoints along it.

I did not spent as much time as I wanted on the game recently. Nonetheless, I added the "building" logic to construct various structures with the "builder" unit. It gave me the occasion to play with the animation system and animator tool for the simple beam animation and logic.

I also implemented the "teleport" mechanism AKA: you can take control of any unit you have whenever you want. The AI will kick in if you're not directly controlling a unit. It was a matter of using what I already did really, since with the components I separated the "ships" and their capacities from the "brains/AI". Here is a little video:

Got a hard time with the contextual interaction system. Rewrote it multiple times to find a suitable trade between simplicity and dryness while preserving the "component" approach of Unity...I might came back to it in the future...again :)

I also added a day/night cycle. Nothing too fancy, but somehow it made me worked on my first shader. Well not for the day/night itself but for the sun. I must say it's really interesting and rewarding to program shaders :)
So, I did a little heat/sun effect and since I was having fun, I looked into a simple shader for the buildings which are being constructed (they appear from the bottom transparent to solid)..

Again Unity helped a lot here. While I took the time to do the whole shader for the sun (CG, with vert/frag functions while learning), for the building I did a Unity Surface shader so I could reuse all their shadow and lighting code.

While actively looking for a full time job, I'm working with Unity3D on a game of my own. Can't say much so far. My programmer background helps but not with the graphics :) ...anyway, I'm focusing on gameplay mechanics and code structure. So far I worked on:

• Basic terrain generation (I don't want to create levels)
• Contextual interactions to construct and give orders to your building/ship
• 2 type of ships are available for now
• A scavenger class which collect ressources tagged by the player
• A scout class which can embark weapons and fight
• AI is using a hand made behavior tree system

I'm still doing a lot of testing and prototyping on different gameplay. Hopefully more to come!