Here is what I started out with, and what I ended up with so far.

Started out with a ball on a screen. Had no idea what the game should be about.. Didn’t even know it would become a game.

Then made the ball fall under the influence of gravity, and added a small static cannon capable of shooting small red balls.

Added colliders to the balls, so the red balls could hit the red ball and then, to make a bit of a game out of it, I added some spikes, that killed the yellow ball on impact.

Added some graphics, and changed the mail ball to a beach ball.

At this time I did my small crap animation project, so of cause that was added to the project. I also did the super soaker graphics while trying out different vector based drawing programs and that was added as well.

The red balls was replaced by a water ball/splash texture.

Added a basic score, so each time you hit the beach ball with a ball of water you got a point, and game when the beach ball hit the sand.

I got the idea to add something to hit instead of just having to hit the beach ball, which was to easy.

I wanted to have a really fast game over to new game cycle, so all I wanted was a single start button in the middle of the screen. At first I would have liked to be able to share scores on Facebook, but as I haven’t gotten it to work 100% I discarded it for now. Maybe in a later version.

Just changed some of the background graphics, and added best score to the score display.

Added sand to the beach.

Completely new graphics, made by a nice fellow that I’m teaching to program, and in exchange his making me some pleasant graphics

New button and font added, that matches the rest of the theme better. The basic font is called Floraless and is made by Daniel Gauthier.

Small but very visual change, I made the score use the new font, by having a bitmap for each number and one for the slash, and then added code to convert the string into an array of the correct sprites.

The last change was the graphics for the crab that now looks a lot more organic and less flat.

The two thing keeping me from uploading it to the android store is the seagull- and the crap-animation. I will work on the crap animation as soon as everything thats happening in my life right now, settles down a bit.

If you want to try the current (Android only) version of “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” just click the link below.
Old version April 9th : md5 : aad8aee9879d29ad0e8bf32cc451b097 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk
New version April 12th : md5 : 5f145660cae4dab6d5c4fea869403f36 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk

Now go make games!

– Henning

This will be the first time I work with 3d charater models, ragdoll and animator. which from time to time have resulted in some very funny and fustrating bugs. One bug that took days, was the ragdolls fell to the ground as expected, then about 5 secounds later they would, for no reason, jump into the air. This would repeate with increased force each time. It turned out to be a collider and rigdiget body element I had added, before adding the ragdoll to my charater. I removed the collider and rigdigetbody, and everything worked fine.

Adding the animator was a challenge, but after watching “Unity 4.0 – Mecanim Animation Tutorial” from Unity3D, which gave me a good introduction into the workflow of mecanim. I was able, in less than an hour, to set up a 3d model and make it run on the spot, but non the less, run.

Stopping the animator and making the model go into ragdoll mode should be easy. Stop the Animation, set all the elements IsKinematic to false and let the physics engine take over. But again something weird happened, when I shot the zombie the animation stopped and the character started to fly around i big circles. Very weird, but kind of funny looking. It turned out that I disabled the animator, stopped it, and then set IsKinematis to false each frame. which did something strange to the physics engine.

I know I have to start over on the model and the ragdoll setup, to make everything match up a lot better. As I didn’t make the model I got a bit confused about what was shoulder and what was forearm, so the ragdoll feels a bit weird, but it works.

Next I’ll be working on the movement of the zombie, to make them move from A to B avoiding the other zombies. I plan to base the algorithm on the work of Stephen. J. Guy, Jatin Chhugani, Changkyu Kim, Nadathur Satish, Ming C. Lin, Dinesh Manocha, and Pradeep Dubey in their 2009 paper, ClearPath: Highly Parallel Collision Avoidance for Multi-Agent Simulation. They made this video to explain the algorithm and to show it in action.

Visit their page where you can find the video and their paper on the subject. http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/CA/

First of all I’ll of cause try to do it all only using Unity physics using basic colliders, to see if the above algorithm will be needed at all.

Until next time, keep making

– Henning