Release 0.1.5 Update

The last few weeks have mainly been spent adding a new level set in the sewers below the city. This build involved two main parts, creating the modular models for the sewers, and assembling the prefabs for the various sewer tunnel sections required. Both processes worked out to be extremely straight forward due to techniques I've picked up over the last few months with my own trial and error and comparing with how others do it.

The main tip I've learnt is to keep the individual modular components really simple, the floor, raised platforms, walls, ceilings, corners, are all separate models. This just seems to make stitching the individual parts together easier and allows you to mix and match lots of different models within Unity to create a wide variety of more complex prefabs from these simple parts. In the past I would have tried to create complete tunnel cross sections as a single model. I found it took way longer than I could afford, most of this time was spent trying to create corners and various intersections which all joined together seamlessly.

The arches in the tunnel walls had me a bit worried, how would I get the corners and intersections to join seamlessly? I worked out a simple method of creating them in Blender which worked with my level of skill. Instead of creating the internal curve, I started with cubes and added an external bevel to one or two edges, then deleted the unwanted faces and flipped the normals turning an external curve into an internal arch.

On top of the level structure I also spent quite a bit of time with the lighting, it's still not what I want but it is looking better. Next I want to try and add some point sources of light bleeding through from above and from various other sources to help create more atmosphere. The other thing I'd like to try is to add some dripping or running water to add some eeriness to the scene.

The last big part of the build was to get the player stats, weapons, and ammo to transfer between levels. I have done this before in a very old FPS that I created a couple of years ago and it turned out to be pretty straight forward. The game manager simply requests the player entity to save it's state into a state object that's set to persist between scenes, and then the player entity loads the state on start.