Mech Jam 2 Postmortem

This jam started off a bit more relaxed than the others, the two weeks seemed like a long time at first but did start to get a bit tight towards the end which resulted in quite a number of nice to have's being dropped. Overall I do enjoy the longer format, a week or two fits my life better than trying to squeeze everything into a day or two.

I tried a couple of new technologies for me in this jam, Unity's newish input system, and the animation rigging package for weapon IK and aiming. The new input system was ok although I did find it completely stuffed up the menu's and dialogs and there just wasn't enough time to try and figure out why, fortunately there was an option to run both input systems in parallel so I enabled that and the problem was fixed. I suspect the new input system really comes into its own when you start building multi-platform games but it didn't help much for a simple Windows game.

I wanted to try the animation rigging package after viewing a this tutorial as it seemed to solve a real problem of how to put a weapon into a characters hands, and have the hands attach correctly while aiming the weapon at targets. In the past I've tended to fudge this by simply childing a weapon model to the character's hand, however this never really works for two handed weapons. I must say it was a bit of a challenge initially as I tried to do it in stages, but after a late night hitting my head against a wall I finally got my head around it all and the next morning went much better. The formula I finished on was to do the following in the order below:

1. Use the first rig layer to parent the weapon pivot (rifle butt) to the character's right shoulder.
2. Use the second rig layer to aim the weapon at an empty game object at the target location, or just in front of the character when idle or walking.
3. The third rig layer then had the hand IK to attach the two hands to the weapon anchors.

Using a parent constraint instead of actually parenting the weapon to the shoulder bone made all the difference as I was able to keep the correct rotation independent of the shoulder. The other important point is to make sure the layers are ordered in the object hierarchy in the same order, and any other references objects like the weapon or aiming target are before the rig layers. Overall I really like the package and I plan to use it to change the mech's weapon aiming.

I'm really pleased with how the game looks, I think I've managed to create quite a few simple but effective models in a relatively short time period. I feel I'm starting to get way more efficient at modelling, I think the two soldier models took less than two hours combined and using Mixamo to rig and animate them is always a winner. The one thing I wasn't 100% happy with was the player mech, I was aiming for a more retro or steampunk look but the front looks too modern with the large windows. I think I'm going to have another go at modelling this part to make it look more like an old WW1 tank with flat angular steel sheets with small slits for vision slots, and maybe some big rivets to complete the look.

The semi-random level building works ok but I would have liked to create more randomness to add variety. Initially I started with the level made up of 20x20m chunks however issues with the NavMesh stitching caused me to abandon this approach and instead go for larger 60x60m chunks with no NavMesh links. This was to fix issues with NPC's moving erratically between chunks as they seemed to teleport when traversing the links. The end result was that they can't move between chunks but you'd hardly notice with the larger chunks.

Overall I think it was a very successful jam however there's a number of improvements that I'm going to look at over the next week or two:

• I'm going to consider removing the right click to aim feature as it kind of ruins the action/flow.
• I want to fix the weapon aiming on the mech and change the body of the model slightly.
• I really want to add enemy machine guns on tripods with soldiers firing them, I just think having the tracer rounds firing back at you would add to the fun and the machine gun was such a iconic and important weapon of the first world war