Digging, Decorating and Dicey Destruction!

Hello hello! Another fortnight flies by. I hope y’all are keeping well, and as we start to emerge from our wintery cocoons, staying safe and healthy! We’ve been a bit ill over here, but that hasn’t stopped us forging ahead with Strays and making the best of our non-delirious time. Want to see?

I had another moment of “I want to see the game looking more like a game” this week, and so I dived into some asset packs I own, as well as some of my somewhat questionable 3D art, and threw in some new assets. We now have a flower bed, which will play host to… err… flowers (not sure what you expected). These will be diggable or destructible, so you can either snap ’em off at the stalk, or uproot them entirely depending on what flavour of chaos you feel like that day. There’s also a pathway to split up the level, we’ve replaced the green plain with a slightly roughened mesh to add a bit of body to the terrain, and straight up took a plant pot from a low poly art pack I have. Here’s a video restating everything I just said, with visuals this time!

For some reason, past Matt didn’t want to demo the plant pot. I’m not entirely sure why, but here is the video of that working too:

John’s auto destruction tech works really nicely with it I think. I reckon with some particle effects and maybe a bespoke dirt mesh added where it lands, we’ll have a truly solid looking piece there! And yes, all the interactables already work with the chaos system detailed in the last post!

I also mentioned in the video adding skyboxes, which you can see working behind the house. This was a nice quick bit of scripting that got a satisfying effect very quickly. Beyond getting some more appropriate skyboxes, I doubt that’ll change much. Now you can see the house at all times of day! What I might do is integrate it with an environment system that will change the colour of the directional light based on what time it is. This would be done at the start of the level, I don’t intend to have time pass in game.

As a final note, and a tribute to the chaos of game dev, I was recording an entirely separate video when this happened:

Physics took one look at my off-brand tower building game, and decided to just not! I’ll leave you with a question: Did the game end, or does player 2 now have to make a move?

Answers in the comments!
Matt out.