Chaos Rift Games Chaos Rift Games: Indie Game Development and YouTuber
It really is hard to match the awesome of last week’s update. As is with any major project, taking a step back to work out new technologies and features is what it’s all about. In today’s video I load up Unity3D and my test scene.
Meet Playmaker!
Playmaker is new to me, but it’s not new. I just managed to score a free license and opted to not let it go to waste. If Playmaker is good enough for Blizzard’s Hearthstone, it’s certainly good enough for me. In short it’s a Finite State Machine (FSM) and visual scripting. It’s all the technology I learned the “hard way” manually programming AI characters. But it’s all that, without the massive amount of bugs. There’s less copy and paste errors, and refactoring is a breeze.
Sidenote: I highly suggest learning the basics of C# and Unity3D programming before doing any “no scripting needed” visual scripters. Why? Because it’ll all make sense. You’ll have that much better of an understanding how all the various components and objects interact and fit together. Trust me, it’s well worth your time.
The State of Affairs
It’s been a long week and a lot has been done. A new landscape terrain was generated with Gaia. The island is now twice the size at 2 square kilometers. There’s much prettier beaches, better rolling hills and a much gentler terrain now. but it also means lots more walking for the player and thus, the need for interesting things along the way (more work for me).
I ditched Invector 3rd person controller for now. I really do like it and may still use it, but the generic named “Third person controller” integrates better with Behavior designer and Playmaker. Plus the documentation is superior. We’ll see how it all pans out. I like how Invector comes with a basic GUI. I believe they both integrate with NGUI.
With Playmaker a lot of possibilities has opened up. If an object needs something done, it can be implemented within a few minutes. Even simple scripts could take upwards of an hour to write and test. With Playmaker, the process averages 5-10 minutes.
Behavior designer means there will be some pretty hardcore AI coming to the game. Granted a neural network could also be trained and implemented for AI. I’m still uncertain. It depends if I get a mysterious budget boost and thus considerably more time each week to work on this.
In closing
Thank you so much for being a part of this exciting journey. I love this whole process and have enjoyed every moment learning, even those times when I woke up stuck to my keyboard.
Next week holds even more exciting things as I delve deeper into Playmake and Behavior Designer.
