Flicker Island, a game to promote a CG feature.

I did 75% of what's done the first week 2.0 was released then I got busy. I needed to finish it up so I started tinkering again. I love how fast I can work with Unity. I'd say there's maybe 30 hours into it and that includes modeling and learning the terrain interface.

The green haired kid is an example of a player character, the model is one of the first things you see when you open the game. I went a little too low res on the model so I'm going to rework it. The character is an odd shape so it was taking a lot of polys. I've done better looking models with half the polys this one already has.

The island will eventually have game play and a lot more models I was really just tinkering to see what was possible. Unfortunately I come from the animation side and I don't know much in the way of programming. I managed to do a few things when I was working Torque Game Builder but for me it's a lot of trial and error and reverse engineering which I don't have time for right now. I was trying to attach the kid character to the camera but I couldn't get Unity to recognize the animation files. I used the Lightwave exporter but no luck so far. I am in the market for some one that knows Unity and can do basic scripting and programming. It'd just be a little part time work for now but we want to do some commercial games with Unity and the island would eventually need some one full time for a while. We're also planning to do an MMO with the Hero engine and there seems to be a lot of similarities how things are done so there might be a chance to play with that as well. The island itself is just to help promote the film.

I'll post a link below to the web site. For the island just click on the Flicker Island link and follow the other links from there. If anyone is interested in a little work e-mail me at belseth@newrealmpictures.com

It should be a fun project. I just want to get a character linked to the camera and maybe another animated character and some simple game play for now. Once we have a deal in place for distribution on the film it can turn into full time work. We should have distribution in place some time in June.


http://freakyflickersthemovie.com/

 

Wow. The landscape and scenery is very well done. Nice texture artwork, too!

May i ask, how large your textures are and how many you have used for the landscape?

Keep up the great work.

Cheers!

Frank

 

Nice work buddy, looks great. I get a lot of ".... is not suported on this computer" when the game starts though, still looks good.
I am no Unity ace by any means, but i think you can attach the cam to the kid just by drag and drop the camera on him...

 

I think there's five actual textures but what I tend to do is set up two different scales so I can over paint one with a smaller scale of the same texture to add detail and break them up to limit that patterning you get from a distance with tiling textures. I'm still working on the texturing. I think everything is 1024X1024. Nothing larger at least.

Not sure about the not supported? I'm extremely new to Unity. I really just used the base island and erased everything so most of it is the sample island. I tweaked a few things but didn't add any scripts or custom shaders. Are you able to play the sample island okay?

I have tried dragging the camera onto the character but it doesn't seem to work. It may be rejecting it because it doesn't consider the model an appropriate object to attach to. I can tell that the animations didn't come through. Unity is by far the easiest game engine I've tried but like anything with a computer if there's one minor thing set up wrong it simply won't work. Lightwave may be the problem. I really hate Lightwave but I'm still learning Maya. I tried importing a Maya file but Unity didn't seem happy that I didn't have Maya installed on this machine. I've got a dongled version which I think I can move so I'll give that a try. Rigging in Maya is time consuming but not too hard. Animating is dead easy and if you put the time into the rigs they virtually animate themselves. It's things like painting weigh maps that's driving me nuts. I can't even open up a weigh map for painting. I follow the steps and no weight map. Once again something needs to be clicked I've just got to find it. My rule of thumb with Maya is the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard. Physics are fast and simple but texturing is a nightmare in Maya. A crazy person designed Hypershade but ironically I love Hypergraph.

Glad everyone likes the island so far. It's not 10% finished yet, no time. Hopefully by the end of summer with some help I can finish it up. I'm dying to add some characters and game play. I'll try to make posts when there's an interesting update. I'm pretty swamped until the film is done. Hopefully by the end of June I'll be freed up.

 

Looks pretty nice. I think whatever you're doing to detect graphics cards is a little messed up though. It turned off water reflections (I've seen plenty of water reflections in Unity with this card), reduced draw distance because I have an 'old card' (It's an ATI Radeon X1600), and turned off high-detail terrain textures too.

 

Actually I haven't done anything to it the problem is I'm using the indy version. I still have to upgrade to Unity Pro for reflections. Money has just been really tight. I'll be doing the upgrade in a month or two. I really need some of the features in the pro version like reflections but every cent has gone into the film. The whole project has been out of pocket and so far we have zero income so we're abut as indy as you can get. That'll change as soon as we lock in distribution. The lack of reflections is driving me nuts though. I can't wait to do the upgrade.

 

OFF TOPIC:

I very highly recommend using Unity for your MMO, as it is easy to use as you know and supports a lot of neat features out-of-the-box. It has an integrated PhysX engine and the network capabilities are supposedly very nice(I've never used them). Plus(super plus, actually) Unity can compile an app that runs directly from a web browser. Getting a game off the drawing board and onto the Internet has never been faster.

 

I very highly recommend using Unity for your MMO, as it is easy to use as you know and supports a lot of neat features out-of-the-box. It has an integrated PhysX engine and the network capabilities are supposedly very nice(I've never used them). Plus(super plus, actually) Unity can compile an app that runs directly from a web browser. Getting a game off the drawing board and onto the Internet has never been faster.

 

Cool idea. I use detail textures on my terrain too, but i never thought of using the same texture for detail... Thanks for this great hint! It looks very convincing.

What i did, was using 4 larger textures of 1024 x 1024 and 4 of 256 x 256 resolution. The smaller ones are mostly grey, so the just add blended structure. But the result was never so convinving because of the vanishing contrast. Your system is really more powerful and better for video ram...

Cheers

Frank