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Windy City Radio

A topic by Petrak created Jul 01, 2017 Views: 932 Replies: 12
Viewing posts 1 to 7
Submitted(+1)

So I got a bit of an early start last night (friday night in Australia), which is CLOSE enough to the 1st. I had a lot of ideas and have been eager to get into it. Basically wanting to experiment with a soft apocalypse/cosy catastrophe setting; everything being destroyed but so much time has passed that nature has reclaimed the world, and the descendants of the global catastrophe are just... doing fine. They've made a home for themselves .

The world so far is just a tree and rock asset that I made ages ago, and everything else is made up with Unity primitives. 

I'm just using a shader that I found that adds shadows to unlit textures, so I VERY quickly could get the look that I wanted. 
This morning I worked on the level some more and also started adding actual functionality, I'm using Adventure Creator, a plugin for Unity that's made for creating point and click adventure games (both 2d and 3d), and I've been using it for my personal project (Tala, a 2D adventure game that combines hand animation and photography), so I'm very familiar with getting it working and very quickly getting things playable. 

So after I got it vaguely playable I drew up a character I designed a while ago while I was teaching myself Blender and drew and animated a quick talk cycle in the style I wanted. 

Here's one of her frames without the awful gif compression. 


So yeah, I got a bit of a head start but now it's technically the 1st in Australia so I don't feel tooooo bad. I REALLY wanted to dive into this concept since low poly 3d with billboarded sprites is something I've wanted to explore for a long time and this opportunity is perfect. 

Gameplay wise I think it's going to have some basic point and click style puzzles,  as well as some scattered tapes around the world that you can collect and take to someone who runs a radio station and add those songs to the background music, which, now that I think of it, is very similar to that anamanaguchi game hahahah.  I think I'm going to add in some windmills ala Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind so I can make it relate to the title a bit more, a portmanteau of Waypoint Radio and the episode title Windy City Politics. 

Host

Holy crap that looks awesome! Is she just a billboarded sprite, and are the animations done in mecanim or outside Unity?  That's such a neat look, love your art style :D

Submitted (1 edit)
Yep,  just a simple billboard. The animation was done outside of Unity then imported in as an image sequence; then I just use Adventure Creator's visual scripting editor to quickly wire everything up. It's pretty fantastic. 

And thank you!! I'm big on games having good art direction and strive to make sure that shows in my own work. (and doing billboarded sprites means that I can very quickly knock out new characters without having to model/unwrap/texture/rig/etc and that simplicity adds a hell of a lot to the feeling of this game :D)

Submitted

Added another character and implemented a radio that switches between a couple of songs. I can't help but think that this billboarding/3d environment would work really really well for visual novels. 

Submitted

Wow, you've set the bar high already! These are some really nice looking clips, and I'm curious to see the story you're going to tell with this world and these characters. Appreciate the in-depth look at everything

Submitted

Thank you! I'm not sure how far I'll get a chance to delve into actual storytelling, I hope that I can throw something together, hahah. Chances are it'll just be a little world to explore.  Going to at least hide some environmental hints as to the history of the area! 

Submitted(+1)


Added interactive character outlines, a first pass to the music collection mechanic, & replaced the radio sprite with a 3d model because it didn't feel right to me. 

Submitted

Ahh this looks so good and fun already! Can't wait to see where this goes...

Submitted

Thanks! :D

Submitted(+2)
Little Robot Pal follows you around now! 

Submitted

Downright adorable

Submitted

Didn't get a chance to work on this anymore, unfortunately! I had a few other ideas that I'll probably play around with in the future though, I adore what little I've created, even if it is just a fancy art test, ahahah. 

https://petrak.itch.io/windy-city-radio

Jam HostSubmitted

Still looks awesome. Thanks for participating and showing us your work!