Developers Log. Development Date 123. Polish!

It's been a month since my last post. Most of my work has been on improving the camera and player controls. I have been hoping to get a blog post about the camera up, but it's not quite there yet. I want to post some of the ideas and logic involved in making an intelligent camera for 3D platforming. The camera is working pretty great, but I hope to explore a few more ideas to really make it shine, so I will save my post on that until a later date.

Aside from that, I have been working on adding polish and tying up loose ends for our GDC demo. After all of the work on the camera, I needed something a bit lighter to restore joy to my soul. I added a small feature I have been hoping for since pre-alpha. I really wanted to help set the atmosphere for the player being a ninja, not just a parkouring guy.

 For this I explored different ways to add a mystical essence scarf that follows the player (like the scarf of a ninja mask.) I first attempted to use a model with joints to allow physics to cause the scarf to swish around as the player moved. In the end this didn't feel feasible in the time constraints I have. Without getting everything right the scarf would fly around like mayhem, crashing through the player and just looking terrible. I then moved onto using a trail renderer, which was simple and much more fitting to my scope of time. I hope to spend more time to find a good texture to use that really gives it the feel I want. For placeholder, I changed my blend type to allow me to just create a black and blue effect.  In the picture below it's much much longer than it is in the current build. This was taken at an awkward time for our scarf.

Part of my essence scarf implementation required me to set up a component that attaches itself to a specific bone of the avatar. The scarf attaches to the head, so that even when the player does a flip, the scarf follows his head. I was able to use this same component to attach a katana to his back, further adding to the ninja feel. Good stuff.