Hello!
Since my last post on this blog, a lot of things happened (and also lot of new experiments!)
As I had the audacity of following my partner and look for new opportunities in Denmark during the pandemic, this meant that I had a bit of free time lately.
After lots of tinkering, I finally decided to record a few videos and make a new post to share some of these.
In the past months, as we were all forced to stay home, I started playing a lot of online coop games with my friends. Some of them were good, some of them less good, and few of them were really a great way to spend time together.
We found ourselves enjoying quite a lot games such as The Forest or Raft and this is why I wondered: I have some free time, why not try to prototype something like that?
There is a lot going on there, for sure.
But, to summarize, I took a few assets from the Unity Asset Store (like Polygon packs from Synty Studios, or Azure Nature for example) and started coding the systems I needed. Some of the things that I had “fun” with are the following:
- Network Replication (using PUN as a base)
- Seamless Additive Scene Loading for the Open World
- Persistent Data Management for objects and characters (even between players in different scenes)
- First Person/Third Person Visual and Animation System
- Distributed Authority (players only load and own scenes that are relevant to them)
- Building and Crafting System
- Day/night cycle, Realtime Lighting (in URP!)
- …more and more stuff that I cannot think of now.
I will definitely make new posts to explain some of the systems I needed to come up with to make everything work. To give you a small taste, here’s a recap of the system I made to handle multiple additive areas, from a test scene to the “final” result:
Another cool taste is this video, that shows you the moltitude of Items and interactions I implemented (trying to make everything as much data driven as possible!).
To completely change the subject (and project), another very fun experiment I did was to build a car controller just to play around with Unity Rigidbodies. Drifting is always fun!
Then I decided to try out an Unity Asset called Shapes, which allows to easily use vector shapes in Unity. I decided to rebuild an old prototype of mine by using only shapes, without a single 2D asset in the project.
Then last but not least, I forgot to add the latest Ludum Dare that I participated in with my friends!
This time, we were a lot of people and it was extremely challenging to coordinate ourselves, so we decided to just go almost randomly and focus on having an amazing time. This is what came out (broken, but fun!).