SUMMARY:

• ROCKIN' IT - Metals are now represented as actual mesh, cubes be gone! We also added reflections.
• TASK TRACKER GOLD IN 1 WEEK- Continuing to add team members as our ultimate feature.

PLAY THE GAME

ROCKIN' IT

Last week we obsessed over the bottle cap which opened a door to something else. That's why we replaced temp cubes with an actual mesh. We made rocks!

There was an awesome tutorial on YouTube called How to Create Low Poly Rocks in 1 Minute by CGGeek, which opened my eyes to a wonderful thing called "modifiers" in Blender3D. For those of you who don't know, it's the ability to take a simple mesh and add a module with varibles from a dropdown menu to add, subtract, edit, and toy around with your selected geo until you're happy with the results, giving hours of details in seconds.

More than that, you can choose a variety of differnt modifiers and stack them on top of each other to create complex mesh in seconds. It's like a 3D version of Photoshop's layering system. Also it's a lot of fun!

While new to Blender3D, it was crazy how in less than 90 minutes we were able to follow along with the tutorial, make our version of something, and when saved, Unity automatically updates the mesh in-game. It's like magic.

Then we automated the coloring of all materials in a table so each metal had thier own special tint. When you play the game you'll see a somewhat authenic tint to rust, nickel, and even gold.

Some of our scripting in terms of coloring was based on AI-powered research. While it's rough, it was cool to see how well copper worked out. In future iterations, we may require a minimum of one rare metal per level, up to a certain point, in order for players to experience the full spectrum of a hunt.

At the last minute we obsessed over adding reflections using runtime-on-awake generated cubemaps, something we never tried in Unity until now. It was surprisingly easy to figure out and implement. But this asset is a black hole in terms of the temptation to nitpick and update, but in the coming weeks we'll keep working on it.

Here you can see the results of research, though AI was a huge help in putting this together. It's not 100% accurate but not a bad first pass.

TASK TRACKER GOLD IN ONE WEEK

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One more thing, we are ALMOST done with Task Tracker. GOLD is about to happen in 7 days (though we may extend this by another week or two for quality control). Here you can see we're hard at work to include team invites for project collaboration.

Generated using Bing Image Creator We're using it as reference but will be basing our desings off this little guy :)

Afterward we'll be switching to CalorieRPG, our fitness role-playing game where you track your points and level up while you log your food. We'll be posting more about that soon. That's it for this week, lots to do, so little time, but we're getting there. Thanks for reading!