This week we finally solved our 3D assets bottleneck.

Blend of skills

Our supervisor Giovanni prompted me to think about utilising more Asset Store (Unity Technologies, 2021) assets to reduce some of the work on 3D assets for the game. So far I've been thinking of the project as a full game development rather than just a prototype developed for a course. This point of view has been prompting me to prefer original work to any already completed assets taken from the store.

Image from Unity Asset Store

Additionally, my 3D modelling skills need work. I've mentioned that in the past and have been working on the side to improve, however, my speed is far from the one of an experienced person. This has caused the 3D modelling work for the project to fall behind a little and the team identified it as one of the big bottlenecks for the team.

Image from Temple Asset Pack store page

To resolve this problem, I've searched the Unity Asset Store (Unity Technologies, 2021) for environment asset packs similar to the environment we are trying to create. I've landed on two packs - Temple Asset Pack (MacLean, 2021) and Eternal Temple (Mana Station, 2021). They have a slightly different art style, however, they are both close to what I was envisioning for the game. The team voted and we picked up the Eternal Temple pack. It is much bigger with a lot more set pieces to play with. With it in place, we are now ready to create full environments with everything under our fingertips.

Image from Eternal Temple store page

Teamwork

This week teamwork wasn't missing either. I worked with James to get him started on setting up the prefabs we've already created such as the player and buttons, as well as connecting those buttons to doors. It is always great fun to collaborate with other teammates, but also it provides me with a first-person view into what it is like to use the assets I've created and how I can improve them. Additionally, I was able to give James some feedback on his level to help him improve on it.

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I keep being surprised by my relatively in-depth knowledge of Unity. So far it has allowed me to support and enable my team to perform better in their roles. Additionally, I think it will give me a safety net in case I decide to move away from my goal of starting my own game studio by allowing me to easily find a job in the industry.

Image from FormulaNone's Flickr

Fixing bugs

While most of my time this week was taken by the environment asset pack and collaboration, I was still able to contribute a little to the codebase of the prototype.

While collaborating with James, we found that the button's release event was fired too many times. This was my highest priority as it was making his level unfinishable. I won't bore you with details on it, however, there was something much more exciting I worked on - a dissolve shader. James mentioned that the plan is to not use doors but vines that disappear once a puzzle is solved and what a better way to do that than using a dissolve effect. I followed Brackeys (2018) tutorial and with some alterations to make it sensible for us, we now have a dissolve shader!

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References

Brackeys, 2018. DISSOLVE using Unity Shader Graph. [online] Youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taMp1g1pBeE [Accessed 19 July 2021].

MacLean, S., 2021. Temple Asset Pack. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/temple-asset-pack-196494 [Accessed 19 July 2021].

Mana Station, 2021. Eternal Temple. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/eternal-temple-65780 [Accessed 19 July 2021].

Unity Technologies, 2021. Unity Asset Store. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/ [Accessed 19 July 2021].

Unity Technologies, 2021. Unity. Unity Technologies.