Internal Milestone 006:
Art and minor polish

This month’s milestone was slowed down again due to contract work, but we still managed to get a few things done that are worth reporting on.

Art!

We are working with the guys at PixelNAUTS Games to do a little preliminary art for us to make our prototype look more like a real game and less like a bunch of boring grey boxes. We don’t have any screenshots to share yet, but here is a piece of concept art for the area they are working on. We are currently calling this area “The Medical Facility”. This image was created by our talented concept artist Brian.

Improved Sight Cone

We touched briefly on how our vision cones are currently working in the post for Milestone 003 and there was a brief glimpse of them in action in the Milestone 005 video. However, this old version of our vision cones didn’t properly represent visually what was going on in the game. As you can see from this screen shot…

even if objects are in the scene, the vision cone appears to not be blocked by them (even though the enemy can’t actually see past them).

I made of a quick video about the improvements we’ve made to it based on a tutorial we found on YouTube from a channel by Sebastian Lague (If you are interested in watching the tutorial we used, it will be in the description for the video on YouTube). I also go into additional improvements that need to be made to this version.

Aiming Inverse Kinematics (IK)

In addition to improving our sight cone representation, we wanted to improve the overall feel of our enemies. I found a free soldier asset in the Unity Store with some basic animations and rather quickly was able to get him animating and aiming using IK. See the below video to see it in action and to get a little more in depth explanation of what IK is.

Next milestone, the guys at PixelNAUTS will be continuing to work on art for the prototype. Our level designer, Chris, will be “grey boxing” new levels/puzzles for us to try out and we’ll hopefully be able to spend some time improving some of our AI responses to the player and also fixing up some nasty bugs that are currently really hurting the overall feel of the prototype.