Hey everyone, This week concludes our first sprint and that means that our game is starting to take shape.

We put the primary focus of this week on creating assets, dressing areas, redesigning our town to a more compact platformer-friendly format, and fleshing out some important mechanics. Let’s have a look at this week’s progress

A more performant way of texturing

In a previous dev log we explained our way of texturing the assets of the game by assigning different materials to different parts of the model. This required us to make a new material for every new color we wanted to add, no matter how much that color would be used. 

Since this is not the most performant way of doing things (something about bottlenecks and whatnot) we were advised to do this in a different way. 

Instead of making several materials, we now just made 1 material that has a texture map in the albedo slot of the material. This texture map consists of a grid of different colors. All colors we want to use for our props, environment, etc. 

As you can see we still have some space left on the texture map for future colors we would like to add, or maybe even different variants of currently existing colors on the texture map. 
 

Current texture map size: 2048x2048

While being a convenient and performant way of texturing, it also brought some extra tasks with it. 

The most time-consuming of them all was placing the UVs of each and every asset previously made onto the texture map. None of the models were particularly hard to place onto the texture map, but when we want texture variations of the same model, we need to first clone our model and then adjust the UVs again, onto our wanted color. 

Again, not a difficult procedure, but very time-consuming. Depending on how many assets need texture variants.

A good lesson to know for future projects was that we might want to start with this approach of texturing to avoid doing double work. Because once everything is set and new models just need to be put on the texture map, it’s very easy and quick to do. 

Switching to a more compact town

Our previous version of the town was pretty big so we narrowed it down to only a few streets and put the focus more on adding platforming elements to the mix. We plan on adding more vertical elements that present themselves as platforms for the player to parkour along for example a jungle gym on the playground. We already worked out a couple of areas to make them look more unique in both concept and presentation.

Previous version:
 
New version:
 

Town Assets

With the decision to make the areas more unique we also had to create new assets to dress the areas with, ranging from slides and sandboxes for a playground to the exterior eating area from a burger restaurant 

Player out of screen handling

The player can now no longer run away from the view of the main camera. When the player tries to do so, an arrow will indicate the position of the player. When the player runs too far away, they’ll be respawned. If the player was carrying any trash when they’re respawning, that trash will be lost.

That’s all for this week,

Cya later fellow trash pandas.