Hello again everyone!

Richard here again with an update on the technical aspects in the game.

Last week I spent most of my time at our VR station, putting together the navigation system in the game. This means that the player now has the freedom to move around in the submarine while the submarine continues to navigate. I also helped adding in the new mesh for the submarine.

There was some glitches with the navigation system that hopefully are solved now. For example you could go through the ground. Being in the periscope / camera mode forced the submarine to go up and down, etc.

Quests

In a game where the objective is to take photos of different types of creatures, it is important that we can create a large amount of different creatures without having to do too much work. It is starting to get close to crunch time, and so far we have not got that many creatures. We will also need a quest for each creature. Right now we have a working quest system, but the problem with it is that each quest has to be added manually in a script. Hopefully it will be possible to create an automated quest manager that grabs all the fishes from a folder and adds them to a list of available quest.

Scriptable objects

Fish creation will be made with scriptable objects. This way designers can create the objects inside the editor in the same way they can create materials, animator controllers etc. The reason we do this is so that designers can focus on creating the game instead of having to create new objects and then put on a bunch of different components for each fish in the game. In unity we usually create a lot of prefabs to solve this problem, but with scriptable objects it will hopefully work even smoother.

Here is a few pictures, showing the creature creation process.

Creating a creature:

The properties window:

And here you can see the box of the swim area in the scene:

Fish behaviour

Luckily for me the designers have already created a basic fish behaviour which makes this whole task much easier. The behaviour they have created is a school / flock behaviour, but I am going to tweak it so that it can work for all fishes we will have in the demo version that hopefully will be released soon.

Other than that I have recently mostly been working on finding and getting rid of bugs. A few days ago, students from Axevalla folkhögskola visited us and they had a chance to playtest the game. It was pretty exciting but I think people are still shy to play a VR game in front of a bunch of strangers so not that many actually tried the game.

The first tool I created, the mesh combiner have not really received any new updates in a while because I have had to put focus on making sure the game was playable for our first playtest.