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A giant leap for… your arms

Where are we now. We have an idea. We have many openings. These need to be barricaded. First question: What is the easiest way forward? I imported my beloved ProBuilder and created a first rough level and placed an awesome free zombie from the Asset Store in there.

FirstVersion

After a first texturing iteration and some decals we end up with this.

FirstVersionTextured

A first look around in play mode is indeed quite scary already but shows several culprits of that approach:

  • the doors need a separate break-apart logic in addition to the wooden planks, means more effort
  • the player needs to stand very close to the doors in order to reach them with the hand
  • the horizontal area is too wide, it is fully implausible to reach left and right with outstretched arms, which is ever worse since the tracking distance of the Leap Motion is only around 20-40cm so you cannot fully stretch the arms anyway

A first solution: reduce the doors and make the room more narrow.

SecondVersion

While this works it is much less fun since one can keep one door shut easily. Not too exciting. So maybe the golden middle is good, two doors.

ThirdVersion

And indeed it is. A bit of tweaking of the perfect width of the openings and I also got rid of the initial doors which solved the separate breaking animation issue. Both sides can easily be reached now with the hands.

To make it easier for the player one opening is initially sealed so he can learn a bit as the game begins and take it slow.

To jump a bit ahead and show the further evolution, here is the final version that made it into the jam entry.

FinalVersion

The lighting is much better, lots of props in the scene, the score counter is actually a monitor, there are broken tracks, UVs are corrected on the walls and much more.

 

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