F: Splice
Hi all,
This is very much a rickety proof of concept/toy at this stage. You are given a flat, empty world. You have a kind of camera that shows you a view of a parallel world full of trees, mountains, and (later) other stuff. Take a picture of the parallel world, and splice that view anywhere in your world. It's a little tricky to explain, so here's a video:
Current build (0.2): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cd2yfa83v07zzn5/AAA_MX-ApT8crRBeDPohg_4Ga?dl=0
Previous builds:
0.1 - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mdlklsz8599efsz/AADz-5DO3m0Y8aexAw6twQ1Aa?dl=0
Controls:
WASD, space to jump
E to toggle your special camera on and off
When camera is active:
Right click to switch between the camera modes
Left click takes a picture when in shoot mode
Left click splices a picture when in splice mode
In shoot mode, the mouse wheel adjusts to focus of the camera to capture particular objects
In paste mode, the mouse wheel scrolls between stored shots
Things I want to work on next:
- A goal of some kind for the player
- Add a few more simple objects, like rocks, clouds, and maybe birds. Or anything with some kind of simulation involved.
- Make the worlds bigger, and put emphasis on exploring to find different objects or "views" to splice in the other world
- Optimize. It runs pretty horrendously at the moment :P
- Make the controls a little more streamlined
As far as giving it some more gameplay depth, I don't want to get carried away it this stage. It would be ideal if this could remain more or less goalless for now and be fun. However, I might add some simple goals that the player can go for (like create 100 trees, make a mountain 50m high, or whatever).
Feedback would be awesome. Thanks!
This is very much a rickety proof of concept/toy at this stage. You are given a flat, empty world. You have a kind of camera that shows you a view of a parallel world full of trees, mountains, and (later) other stuff. Take a picture of the parallel world, and splice that view anywhere in your world. It's a little tricky to explain, so here's a video:
Current build (0.2): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cd2yfa83v07zzn5/AAA_MX-ApT8crRBeDPohg_4Ga?dl=0
Previous builds:
0.1 - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mdlklsz8599efsz/AADz-5DO3m0Y8aexAw6twQ1Aa?dl=0
Controls:
WASD, space to jump
E to toggle your special camera on and off
When camera is active:
Right click to switch between the camera modes
Left click takes a picture when in shoot mode
Left click splices a picture when in splice mode
In shoot mode, the mouse wheel adjusts to focus of the camera to capture particular objects
In paste mode, the mouse wheel scrolls between stored shots
Things I want to work on next:
- A goal of some kind for the player
- Add a few more simple objects, like rocks, clouds, and maybe birds. Or anything with some kind of simulation involved.
- Make the worlds bigger, and put emphasis on exploring to find different objects or "views" to splice in the other world
- Optimize. It runs pretty horrendously at the moment :P
- Make the controls a little more streamlined
As far as giving it some more gameplay depth, I don't want to get carried away it this stage. It would be ideal if this could remain more or less goalless for now and be fun. However, I might add some simple goals that the player can go for (like create 100 trees, make a mountain 50m high, or whatever).
Feedback would be awesome. Thanks!
Comments
I have no idea what that line was supposed to represent that you can move up and down the picture...
And what happens when you splice one hill on top of another, do they get added together?
I`m imagining a game where you have powers to see into the past, how things used to look, to find clues to solve mysteries.
And yeah the leveller thing didn't make sense yet.
Very interesting idea, lots of potential, it could be one of those puzzlers type things, if you can communicate a solid set of rules to the player. Cooool :)
The sort of brief I gave myself was that a photo, pasted anywhere, should show that exact view in your world after pasting it (or as close as technically possible). I wasn't really sure of what that would look like when you pitched a photo of a mountain up or down and pasted it, or pasted against a cliff face or something, so I was experimenting with all of that in this build. I think the problem is twofold: it's tricky to work out what it should be doing and so even more confusing for the player, and it's also difficult to implement technically.
What I might do for the next build is try and have object based terrain sitting on a flat ground plane. So like a tree, a section of mountain is just an object that can be photographed and pasted at any angle. Like trees, you could photograph mountains and paste them up in the sky and have them fall. It's a little less exciting to me than smooth undulating terrain, but I think it'll make more sense, and I'll keep my sanity. I can always revisit the terrain thing again later.
@vintar Thanks for the feedback! That's a really awesome idea. @Rigormortis actually had something similar, in that different cameras/lenses could let you see into the past and future, and you could capture items that change along a timeline (eg. trees that grow over time) and paste them into a different timeline to see other results. There's a lot to play with there.
Not sure about an end game, but puzzles could form a good part of the gameplay. Take a photo of a broken tree trunk at the right angle, and you can paste it over a ravine in your world. Stuff like that. I've also had thoughts about lenses that show you worlds with different objects or physical properties, though that'll probably be out of the scope of the competition.
Thanks for the feedback so far guys.
I may well add some of that smaller, room-like content (time permitting) and make it pretty modular, as you mentioned. That might also be good stuff for combination-style puzzles.
Re: the trees breaking into planks example - I like this. It's a part of the aspects of world simulation I need to start thinking about next.
I've done away with the funky terrain deformation stuff in favour of big chunky rock objects that get duplicated like trees. I've also added the ability to adjust your camera's depth of field. Only the objects that are in focus get captured in a snapshot.
It's still basically an aimless toy, but I wanted to keep updating and get some feedback on whether this makes more sense than the previous system.
@Gazza_N Thanks man! To be honest, it was pulled off in possibly the most brutish way possible :P I just spawn a bunch of tiny quads that act as visibility nodes for the camera's viewing frustum. If the camera sees a node, it records it's world position when the snapshot is taken, then clumsily tries to map it back to the vertex array, with your current rotation taken into account. It's kind of a mess XD
Anyway, the effect is still kinda cool, but I think the new object based system is just more understandable for now. I'd still love to return to that terrain morphing stuff later.
I played around with some sound fx and wanted to create the feeling that the switch between camera world and real world is very apparent so i put a hi-cut/low-pass filter on the music when it switches to the Video mode. There is also some wind and nature ambience in that mode which I thought could be cool in creating a different feel -> the real world feel has clear music but no ambience and the video mode has ambience but the music drops more to the background...
I felt really inspired by the concept which is why I thought it would be nice to add a little spice.
Feel free to give any sort of feedback please! :)
Thanks :)
Thanks a ton for all your crits and ideas though, and extra thanks to @Mexicanopiumdog for using this for his awesome sound and music entry!
Alternatively if you want all edges to be hard you can just set the normals to none which will give all the faces a hard faceted look. Unity also has control over the smoothing angle which does a similar job to the edge split modifier.
As far as the modeling, it's just a bunch of those cone shapes that I stacked on top of each other. Quick and dirty :P