Update 24: Setting up a Build process

While I've been relatively quiet here, I have kept busy. I've used these last two weeks as a breather as I keep focused on a busy 6 weeks at work (6 deployments in 6 weeks) and work on a few infrastructure details. 

I had invested a fair amount of time setting up my project to check into the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) service and run a build to validate the code integration. This was more trouble than usual for a few reasons

1. Unity doesn't support VSTS integration, so I had to create a script to check out my files to an intermediate location, copy over the updated scripts and then check in my files again.
2. The build process isn't straight forward with the new Windows 8.1 preview service.

The results are promising, but it still doesn't *quite* work. Still, I know left this too long. Now that it's setup, every change I make is backed up, checked in, labeled with comments about the change and then built to ensure the change hasn't broken something else.

Next I'm working on a few minor changes to setup early path-finding and improve movement, as well as fixing some animation bugs. 

There is also a software release next week that will keep me busy (aka: distract me). 

Update 23: Alpha 1.6 - Lots of stuff finally released!

Alpha 1.6 has been released. This represents about 10 months of (part time) development, and is finally a little mini game. Admittedly a game without much depth, but still a game! Included in this release (since Alpha 1.5) are:

• New cameras
• Timing fixes all over
• A very basic AI
• New character models and animations
• More dynamic explosions
• Targeting indicators
• More advanced stress testing
• Links to the currently active test levels
• And lots of little bug fixes

This is all pretty exciting to me, and I've started working on a story/theme for the next step, while I also add in some feature requests and refine some of the mechanics a little.

Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think!

http://www.samsmithnz.com/content/tbe/tbe_alpha1.6.zip

Update 22: Alpha 1.59 - Cameras

I was so close to releasing Alpha 1.6, but at the last moment I had to postpone due to camera issues that forced me to spend an extra week rewriting the camera mechanics. I'm close, the camera now pans, rotates and zooms with just a few issues left on some of the camera position calculations for the AI.

It's all good though, the new characters look great and the AI is also progressing nicely. It's so close to a game now! I'm hoping to release Alpha 1.6 by Monday.

Update 21: Alpha 1.57 - Upgrading the character model

With the timing fixed, it was time to take the next step in implementing line of sight. 

An early line of sight mechanic highlighted how simple my character models were. As my characters are still just a single object (cylinder), cover effectively made my targets invisible if the one point of balance in the center of the cylinder was behind cover. It was time for me to develop my characters a little, to have multiple points (head, arms, body, etc).

Heading to my sketchpad again, I tried to design a simple model about the height and width, with arms, legs, a body and head.

The new model ends up looking a bit like this (with the old model to the left). It's a little silly looking, but is enough of a person for me to continue building the game engine.

What does he look like in a level? This is some basic animation I am using to aim at a target (The right arm is at 90 degrees - like I said "BASIC"). There is still a long way to go, but this is at least an upgrade from the cylinder.

Update 20: Alpha 1.56 - Timing

One of the biggest bugs in my code has been the timing of the camera movement, shooting and throwing. I've put off solving these problems for a variety of reasons, but with some early AI experiments, I found that it suddenly became essential to solve this immediately.

Fundamentally, the issues come from my usage of Coroutines, a Unity function that runs until it is finished. It's almost the same as creating a new thread. I use coroutines for my camera movement, shooting, throwing, and soon, for AI.

My game is simple, but still complex enough that I decided to create a separate  isolated test level to solve this problem. This little doodle shows my plan. I need two 'paddles', a ball to bounce back and forth, and the camera to switch between the two paddles between bounces. This functionality is all very similar to the way my camera follows a character taking their turn, and has them shoot/throw an object at an enemy.

With this design, my test looks like this:

I was able to easily try a few different tests, running through the 5 steps designed above, firing two projectiles instead of one, and really ensuring that the timing was working. I found that I could never get coroutines to wait. My bug was relatively simple (of course), and I've spent the last few hours actually refactoring the main branch of the code. Once this is working, I'll post about the AI.

Update 19: Alpha 1.55 - Targeting and More Dynamic Explosions

Continuing with my momentum, I've implemented a new mechanic based on some feedback I received. When the camera zooms in behind a player to shoot, it now shows a partially-transparent-targeting-indicator. It's now a little more obvious who you are aiming at, especially when there are a cluster of enemies close together.

I've also been working at creating more dynamic explosions. In Version 1.45 I had created a prefab that contained little blocks. When the prefab was hit, I'd basically pull down the wall and let the little blocks explode. While effective, I found that when I scaled up from a 10x10 level to a larger 30x30 tile level, that the prefabs and all those little blocks really hit the frame rate pretty hard. 

To solve this, I wrote a little class that divides the parent object into a series of smaller cubes - created when I need them. Then instead of a million little cubes buried in my level, the cubes aren't created until they are needed.

Here is a sample before:

And after: 

Next on the list is some timing and camera improvements.

Update 18: Alpha 1.5 - Finally Moving...

I finally have my characters moving. If you know me and have talked to me about this project, this has been a significant barrier for the duration of the project to date. I've tried multiple path finding algorithms and methods to move my characters, mostly with pretty horrific (lack of) results.

Today that changed. 

It's simple, but it involves two pretty important mechanics. 

1. A simple tile based system that highlights possible moves. This creates the 'sectors' my game needs, but still gives me the flexibility to not be tied to these tiles. 
2. The ability for me to click on the highlighted tile and actually move the current character to that position.

The test level below shows both mechanics at work, but in the final game, the red grid will not be visible.

You can download the Alpha 1.5 version here: http://www.samsmithnz.com/content/tbe/tbe_alpha1.5.zip. Also included in this build are links to some of my test levels, where I develop and validate mechanics in isolation, the explosions from 1.45 and some more bug fixes. 

As well as this, I'm still continuing to improve dynamically exploding walls, setting up the final milestones for the complete Alpha demo, starting to develop a theme/story and finalizing a few other details. So what is left? I have 5 items that I'm currently working through in various stages, and 8 more items that I have not yet started. (This neat chart was produced by Visual Studio's free and online version of Team Foundation Server).