VR city builder:
Hello all, I wrote about a project I am working on about three months ago. Now, I am finally at the stage where I have created enough art and functionality to start showing you guys all about it. Unfortunately I am working alone now, so progress is a little slow. However, I am really loving how everything is coming together.
So let's start from the beginning. I really wanted to make a VR Leap Motion game and started thinking how cool it would be to do a city simulator game in VR. I also thought Leap Motion would give some really cool and fun interactivity for players. So although this game has gone through many iterations, as most usually do I think I have come up with some cool solutions and found a good flow for the game. I have also developed what I think is a really cool and cute visual style and everything feels like it's really clicking.
The other day I decdided to take a break from some of the technical work I was doing and I decided to make some effects for my game. I really wanted to do a weather system, or rather a season system and so I brainstormed some ideas to illustrate the seasons to the player. I eventually would like to have 2 effects for each season, but started with just 4. The first one I did was a pretty obvious choice, snowflakes for winter. For this sprite sheet I decided to draw 8 different snowflake variations like how they appear microscopically. I wanted to do a more stylized snow rather than a flurry or something more realistic. I have a lot of deatail in the artwork of my game so I thought this would be a really nice place to continue the theme. Now for this effect I chose to have Unity choose a different start frame for each particle that way they all appeared different. The next particle I chose to do was a butterfly for spring. This one was really fun because I got to do some sprite sheet animation which I really enjoy doing. I drew out a sprite sheet that was 12 panes and make sure I had the wings of the butterfly go through one cycle of a flap. So the first frame is the butterfly with wings fully extended, frame 7 is the wings in their most vertical state and by pane 12 the wings are one step away from being fully extended again. Now within Unity this rate seemed a little slow, so I did increase the number of cycles that are played within the lifecycle of the particle in order to make the butterfly seem like it was flapping it's wings at a normal rate. I also changed the life spans of each particle to be within two different numbers as a way to make it appear that some are moving more rapidly than others. Next I chose to create a sprite sheet of bumblebees to be played in the summer cycle. This sprite sheet was bit easier as the wings are less complex so I only needed 8 frames to get the full cycle represented. Finally I made a sprite sheet for autumn which was a leaf falling, as if it were falling off a tree. This one took quite a bit of frames, 16 to be eaxct to ensure that the movement was as fluid as possible. I really wanted a nice slow decent as the leaf fell and I had it change directions pretty often so there was quite a bit of in betweening I had to do to make it appear smooth. For this effect I chose to have it react to the ground plane, so that for the last few frames of the animation where it appears to be coming to a stop and falling flat it is in fact doing that one a plane. This adds to the realism of this effect and I think makes it seems really life-like.
I will be posting a video of these four effects on my newly created VFX page, under the Portfolio tab. I am also going to be posting my sprite sheets there so you can see how I go about creating the animation of the image.
I will continue to write about and post video of my game as it develops further and further. I hope to have the remainder of the work (to create a viable demo) done within about a month and will continue to add features that are on my wishlist as I continue working on it.
