What is new this week?
I have continued with the Main Menu, which now rotates in a looping 360 degree animation, and animates a target, that skips from position to position, within the camera frustum. The code allows the target to choose a random position to move to, and a random sound effects play, on Target Instantiate and Target Destroy events.
Originally, I wanted to have several different target types in the Main Menu, but very quickly I noticed, it felt like more of a game than the current ‘ingame experience’ (albeit, still in the workings), so I kept it simple, as one target, which moved about and made silly sounds, sort of teasing the player. I have yet to add target gameobject animations, but this is the intent for the final product, to have a cheeky character, and make it bum-wiggle and the like, and tease the player.
So lots of code adding and tweaking was necessary to change from the original static-target setup, to the current animating one, but that all good, because much of that code will be reusable on the ingame stages.
I also did some basic art set changes to the 360 degree scene, adding some depth to the scene, for creating space to place 3D objects and billboards between the main play area and the skybox. So there was some camera editing, z-fighting and clipping fixes, material sorting changes, emission properties on some, additive on others, to get the layout/setup I ‘think’ I want to achieve – at least for right now. Changes also impacted on my visual effects, which required a sorting order pass, as well. But it was worth the time. I slapped in a simple mountain billboard, just for good measure, and to indicate a mid range art asset.
Finally, today I dropped in some placeholder sound effects for the Target Instantiate event. The first set of sound effects were loud and quite crude, and it was glaringly obvious that I needed something more subtle, so I settled for a 2nd set of shorter giggles and laughs. I also added a ratio value that I could set, to control the frequency of the playback of the sound effects, as it was not necessary for every target instance to have a sound effect. At the moment, a sound effect plays randomly, approximately every 4th target instance. Less is more and makes such a difference.
Alas, that is all I have done this week. Doesn’t look like a lot, but a fair amount under the hood. Below is a short video capture of the Main Menu target, doing it’s thing.