🎮 Castaway Island + Henwards Legacy Demos - GDA#2

[UPDATE JULY 19th] : The poll ended, thank you for your responses, and this post is now public❤️

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Hey friends!

I'm so happy you liked my last mod releases, they involved so much work and I'm relieved they're out there now...

I come today with news regarding my Game Dev Adventure 🥳 While I was working to release my last mods, I was also trying to learn a lot of things in the Unity Game Engine and I'd like to share some of that with you. 

First I'd like to tell you that the past few weeks/months have been really stressful for me, but also full of great new discoveries. I LOVE learning new things and feel like this new path I chose came at the exact right moment. I didn't have as much fun as I used to when creating mods lately, and it became kind of like a "burden", bringing lots of anxiety. But now that I'm working towards creating my own games, I find myself enjoying it like I used to when I started modding, and I probably like it even more, because of the freedom it brings me. Working in the Unity Engine is like a dream. There are no limitations but my imagination, and I feel that on a whole other level... 

So let's talk about game dev! I've been working on (already too many) test projects, in order to practice my development skills. I feel like a total noob with actual game development but am so happy with the few demos I've managed to create!

Today, I'd like to share some things I learned while creating this demo: Castaway Island

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Castaway Island (Demo Test Project)

Castaway Island is a game concept I'm working on these days to learn several aspects of development. In the story of this game, the main character crashes on a tropical island and has to survive by building his dream camp, and exploring the island to find the secrets it hides... Little disclaimer here: I have no plans on releasing this demo (or any other one anytime soon)... It's a game concept, with the only purposes of learning game dev, doing research, having fun, and sharing with my community!

So let's get into it! What did I learn while working on this test project? 

------------- 🎮 PLAYER & CAMERA 🎮 --------------

First, I learned how to manage a Third Person Character Controller. What is this? It's used mainly in adventure games, where the camera follows the character from behind, which is different from the Sims (using a free roaming rotational top shot camera, oof that's a long title).

(GIF of the third person controller in my test project: Castaway Island)

I love this kind of 3rd person controller, it reminds me of adventure games I so enjoy playing like Tomb Raider, Journey or even Assassin's Creed. I made it using Assets downloaded on the Unity Asset Store, and customized it so that my character can walk, jog or run with different camera angles and speeds for each one.

------------- ▶️ INTERACTIONS & ANIMATION ▶️ -------------

Also, learning how to manage that controller helped me understand something new: Animation! I've done a few animations in the past for Sims Mods, but didn't really know how it worked in-engine. It's so interesting, and once again full of possibilities! So I added to that character controller animated interactions.

(GIF of the "pick up object" animated interaction)

As you can see in the GIF up above, when my character gets close to an interactive item, a few things are happening:

• The Pickable Object highlights itself with a white outline, used in many games to indicate the player an interaction is available on this object
• A Ui Tip Text appears: "Pick Object" to reinforce the information to the player
• When I click, my character plays an animation, picking up the object
• The Object disappears in an animated transition
• A Notification appears on the top right corner to indicate the player they found an item
• And finally, the object's information is added to another component: player's inventory

All of this involved many hours of research for me to understand how it works, and many more to make it real. Especially the Inventory part that I'm just starting to work on. Long way to go if I want to create my own sim game one day ;)

------------- 🌍 WORLD & ENVIRONMENT 🌍 -------------

One of my favourite things in game dev (as some of you may know) is World Building! I love creating worlds, and there are absolutely no limitations in the Unity Game Engine. 

So I created this tropical island using some more assets, added an ocean with cool effects like waves, dynamic transparency, etc.

(Screenshot of the Castaway Island World)

While there is no code written in the world 3D models, I did have to program (from scratch!!) the lighting in order to create for the first time: a dynamic sky (see the GIF down below).

A dynamic sky involves having the sun and the moon rotate in order to make it seem like there is a night and day cycle. To make this work (and look good), I had to play with:

• Creating a Virtual Clock: to calculate all the evolutions in the lighting and environment during the day, the first thing to do was to have a time scale. I got this by creating a virtual clock with 4 "hours": Morning, Noon, Evening and Midnight. All the elements down below depend on this virtual clock.
• Dynamic Fog: the fog changes color and density during the day, darker during the night and lighter during the day.
• Dynamic Skybox: the skybox is what you see in the sky, that means clouds, zenith & horizon colours, and more.
• Dynamic Sun: the sun is getting more and more red when it's going toward the horizon, and fades out when touching it

That's it for this Demo Project, I hope you liked the explanations and insights, and would like to ask a question: would you like to see a video about this Castaway Island concept game? Tell me in the comments, because I'm using the poll for the Henwards Legacy project in this post after the one I published last week!

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POLL: Henwards Legcay (Demo Test Project)

You chose it with the last poll: I will be making a YouTube video about a game I've been trying to re-create: Hogwarts Legacy (called Henwards Legacy in my universe).

So I have a new survey for you today, because I have no idea how I want to present this project. First I wanted to do a video series, then I wanted to make a single video, but also considered creating some YouTube Shorts... My question is: how would you like to watch the Henwards Legacy Project? Please vote in the poll down below between the options I have.

That's it for today friends! Thank you for sticking with me even after I retired from modding. So many of you decided to keep supporting me on Patreon and I seriously didn't expect it. You're the freaking best❤️

Love you all,

Arnie

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POLL QUESTION: 

So, what should be the video format for you to watch the Henwards Legacy Project?

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