Hello folks, been a while since I've updated about this project, mostly due to the scripting challenges but I made a lot of progress with the modelling and structure of the game levels.
In the previous episode, I talked about modelling some obstacles similar to the Nigerian streets vibe, I talked about modelling a rickshaw vehicle and also a commercial bus.
I wanted to achieve a low poly representation of this, my previous attempts at this was mainly through blender but the poly counts was insane and whenever I tried using the inbuilt tools for re-topology it completely deformed the object.
So I re-modelled this completely through unity, using simple shapes.
I've realized that every object model has to have a reference point and the most relevant reference point is the main character itself. the size of every object has to be in a realistic proportion to the body of this character, so I started crafting the model from that pov.
I also discovered that the easiest shape that can be manipulated is a simple plane compared to a cube, it's funny how things get easier once I start to break down the shapes and also a bonus point is that It also gives me a low poly count.
If you observe you would see the under side of the plane at the windshield starts to get transparent, that is because planes only have one side, I researched and found out a way to create a custom shader to solve this, but I later scrapped that idea, since the player will not be viewing this "obstacle-object from the behind."
After a while of manipulating the vertexes I was able to achieve a low poly figure of my objective, now the next step was to apply the materials on it.
but before that, I also had to model the commercial bus obstacle object also, known as danfo in Nigeria, they typically look like camper Volkswagen auto-mobiles.
The funny thing was that I used the same plane-frame for the rickshaw vehicle to make this with just a bit of deformation here and there.
After applying some test materials, it started to look familiar.
I just had to copy and paste the same object with different materials edited on it to achieve a bit of variety.
I think six objects would do for now, that was until I got another idea to increase the difficulty of this game by adding an extra element.
I created a ditch or some type of pot-hole, my reasoning behind this is that, since the player is focused on oncoming big vehicles, they might not expect a small ditch on the ground to pop up at random, this would keep the player at alert on the gameplay and prevent boredom.
Another element of difficulty is also increasing the speed of the gameplay as the player progresses.
I would still need to program a bit of vector motion of the vehicle, they are stationary at this moment of testing.
WHAT NEXT
The immediate step is to continue working on the scripting, the same way I scripted the street spawner, but because of the number of objects on screen, I might have to adopt a new approach, after a lot of "googling" I recently discovered some method called "Enumeration" in unity which can solve this.
That is all for now, join me next time I come up with something creative on this project.