After I created the UI text for my project, I remembered that there is a font called OpenDyslexic, which is free to use and has no usage restrictions. It is an open source font that is designed to be easier to read for people with dyslexia.

(Source: https://opendyslexic.org/about)

I would also like to try and add a background to the text to make it stand out more, which in turn would make it easier to read. Here’s what it looks like in the project:

 

Today I worked on coding the collectables in my project so that the score would be visible in the corner of the screen, and so that the objects would disappear once collected. Here is a screenshot of my script:

To make this script, I actually copied a script that I made back in September for another project and then modified it to work with this project. Here is the original script, just for reference:

I also had to modify some of the colliders on the collectables in my scene, since a few of them didn’t work correctly. The ones that didn’t work were replaced with box colliders. Here are some examples:

Here are also some examples of how the screen looks while playing the game:

The “New Text” in the upper left corner is what I plan to use to show the player how much stamina they have left. I plan to do this by have the stamina shown as a number that gets lower when the player runs. This means that I won’t have to design a stamina bar as it can just be shown using text instead.

Today I mostly worked on adding colliders to the objects in my scene. I was able to add mesh colliders to many of the objects, which saved me a lot of time, however the mesh colliders didn’t work on the trees in my scene so I instead used capsule colliders on them. Below are some examples:

I also created a new skybox for my scene, which can be seen in the screenshots above, however the screenshot below show it better:

As well as this, I realised I needed a way to stop the player from being able to fall off the edge of the map, so I added four cubes around the edge and turned off the mesh renderer for them. The outlines of the cubes can be seen in this screenshot:

Finally, I also added in player character. For this, I used Unity’s FPSController from the standard assets pack, and edited some of the settings. The settings I’ve chosen to use can be seen in this screenshot:

Below are some screenshots of work that I did last week but didn’t get the chance to upload to my blog:

These screenshots show how I’ve added more detail to the desert area of my map, as well as filling in parts of the riverbed with rocks to make it less deep. I also tagged all the collectable objects in the scene as “collectable” so that I can use this when it comes to the coding aspects of my project.

Yesterday and today I chose to work on scene dressing in Unity. Here are some screenshots showing my work so far:

Unfortunately, for much of the week I wasn’t able to work on my project due to illness, however today I was able to do a little bit of work. Here is a deer that I modelled:

 

Yesterday I worked on figuring out how I could create water for my project. I did this by adding normal maps to a plane to see what kind of effects I could achieve. I found that this worked quite well to create interesting looking water that I feel works well with the art style I have chosen for my project.

Once I determined what technique to use to create the water, I realised I needed to create some normal maps to use specifically for the water in order to achieve the look I wanted. This is one of the things I worked on today.

I originally intended to create a texture in Photoshop that could be used as a normal map, however I realised this would require a lot of work in figuring out how to manually draw the normal map to have the heights that I wanted. This lead me to use a different technique, which required me to create models in Maya that had the heights that I wanted the normal map to have. I then used x-normal to render out a couple of normal maps from the models I made. These normal maps can be seen below:

The first image shows the normal map that I ended up using for the water, while the second image shows the normal map that I actually ended up using for the collectable items in my project. In the screenshots below, you can see how these normal maps look when applied to objects within the project:

In general, I’m quite happy with the way these assets look with the normal maps applied to them. In particular, I feel that the collectable assets stand out well from the rest of the environment and have an interesting appearance.

Once I finished creating the normal maps and testing them on my models, I decided to import all of my assets into Unity and begin scene dressing. So far I feel that it is going quite well and that the assets look good within the environment. Here are some examples:

So far, I have only worked on putting trees into the scene, however once I feel that there are enough trees and that they are arranged in a way that I feel looks good, I will begin adding in some of the other assets. I may also begin asking people for feedback on how they feel that my project looks so far. For this, I could ask some of the people who answered the surveys that I created during the pre-productions stages of the project, as many of the respondents to the art style survey were students that I am familiar with.

In this post I also want to include some screenshots to show all of the assets I have within my project so far (excluding the terrain):

These screenshots show all of the models and materials in my project currently (once again excluding the terrain itself), including the normal maps I created today, and the materials I created using them. I’m hoping that by the end of the week I will be able to finish scene dressing so that I can move on to the coding aspect of the project, as I feel that this will be the most challenging part for me and I would therefore like as much time as possible to be able to work on it.