Daily Reaction Game Dev: We Must Destroy

With the biggest news of the day being the announcement of Gran Turismo 6 on PS3 this holiday, you might be expecting a Daily Reaction all about it. But we did that already, because we’re that awesome. Go read it. Instead, it’s time for another Game Dev update, as Seb and Dan get ever closer to releasing a game just for you.

Seb: After finally working out a method for rotating our player the way we wanted, we moved ahead to the next big aspect of our game – collision. We wanted our character-thing to be able to interact with game objects by pushing through them, but the build we had at the time simply caused our player to move straight through everything like they were ghosts.

Dan: Yeah, we figured that if we started getting the major fundamental aspects of what we needed to do down, we would be able to understand the direction we needed to take the project in. Sadly, Seb was able to quickly click a button and give our object a ‘rigidbody’ but when I tried the same, I was met with a completely opposite outcome.

Seb: Yeah, as we all know, Dan has troubles with his rigidbody and no amount of therapy or pills can help that. But we tried to work out why our supposedly-identical simulations were working so differently, a problem exacerbated by the fact we’re on different continents.

After much, much struggling, we were close to giving up.

Dan: Strangely, the issue was resolved by removing all of the attached scripts from my GameObjects and re-attaching them, then and only then, did Unity actually decide to work. After that strange hump, we quickly were able to add a killscript to any object we wanted that made contact with our player.

function OnCollisionEnter(collision : Collision)

{  Destroy(gameObject);  }

Seb: It was a big step forward, our character can now blast through objects like a rocket through butter, immediately vaporizing them. But we wanted the destruction to be more visible – imagine in Uncharted if your bullets made everything immediately disappear, that’d be no fun. We wanted the objects to break up under impact. Unfortunately, it turns out Unity isn’t capable of really doing that by itself.

Dan: Looking into the various ways to do destruction, we decided that we aren’t going to take shortcuts and that we will have to learn to do 3D deconstruction, and that means using the 3D animation tool Blender. Fortunately, I have do have a decent background in 3D modeling, but that is with other programs like 3D StudioMax and ZBrush and I don’t know how much of that will translate. I do know now that, while it feels like we have been making big strides to getting where we wanted to go, in reality, we have only reached the base of what lies ahead.

What was the last thing you utterly destroyed? Do you want to play our game yet? Share your thoughts in the comments below, email us blended ham pictures to [email protected] and tweet us encouraging insults at Seb and Dan.

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