Project Tundra!

Ok,

I put off this blog for ages! Mainly due to focusing alot on the actual project/learning and trying not to distract myself from anything.

Down to business, the main idea of this project was to allow myself to do some level design, get some portfolio content and enjoy myself while learning/developing a project (and my brain!). I figured, a third person dungeon crawler would be ideal here, mainly due to how over done they are - learning the C# would be interesting, but there's a plethora of knowledge out there to help with this. In addition to this, I like making levels! And i needed a medium to let me do it, that wasn't just: "I need to make levels for something". There was a goal here, levels I needed to make for my own project because I wanted it functional, not just because I should be making levels, and you know, because I like them (I find I prefer making them when there's an ultimate goal -though granted, self improvement and just for sheer fun is a good goal too!)



Onwards!


I have this annoying inclination that is terrible practice for game/level designers, and that is; I like the game/level to have actual real assets - I can't stand the permanent whitebox methodology that is always the go to of developers; Now, I'm not saying this is always what I do, and I will whitebox out a level, but if I already have assets that can be used, I'd rather do that - after all, tweaking them in any 3D package to better suit my needs isn't a huge amount of effort (Uni taught me some useful things after all!). So, I traversed to the near unityasset store - and luckily there's a sweet package from Synty Studios called "Simple Dungeon Asset Pack" and Simple Dungeon Interior" or something similar, there's were perfect, cheap and simple, they'd do the job for now.


Initial placement of the assets was to get a feel for what I wanted for this pseudo dungeon crawler. And the first decision was/still is kinda, based around the camera: Initially I had the Diablo style in my head, the isometric view with the camera locked/following the player, my problem with this is, mainly due to my limited coding knowledge and apathy to want to code a good camera system, that the level design would have to take that more into consideration, at least for asset placement:

Here's 2 variants of the camera I was toying with:




Now, with each of the above styles taken into consideration, the movement needs to be taken into consideration, naturally you wouldn't have WASD with the first image style camera, it would feel weird, though it depends how differently we designed the camera/levels/controls ultimately. I would likely have to utilise a Click to move system for the first camera style, this means when developing, I have to take into consideration where the camera can ray-trace too and not have the mouse contorl feeling intuitive. I settled for the second camera style, and will utilise WASD movement, there's many reasons I've chosen this style, but ultimately, I just prefer the look for the type of level I've been creating, It's better to see the enemies/environments and will allow for a more interesting dynamic when creating traps/puzzles and boss mechanics...eventually™*

Now, I know there's  an "easy" work around for my reasoning, I could fog of war, or I could just limit the draw distance of the camera; but I kind of don't want to have to do that. I'd essentially settled on the WASD movement, the player character will always run forward the direction they're facing, but can rotate the camera around with the mouse at their leisure.

This took a lot of work to implement! 
(but it kind of  works now! still needs polishing but that comes later! )
I'm a designer, not a developer ;) 


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