The Rise of Dagon : Pits, Brazier's, Unity 5.0 released, and more oh my!

Last week I shared the new Portcullis that I was able to get in to the level format and editor for the Rise of Dagon.

As anticipated I went ahead and implemented more items in to the level format.

So this week I have added the following:

• uncovered pits
• covered pits (traps essentially)
• pressure plates
• floor braziers

An important note to make though ; I did not put in the logic to control the pressure plates and the covered pit doors.. that will have to be in a future update as it took a fair bit of work to get this content in this week.

I had one problem when doing it and that was the default Unity UI doesn't have a 'drop down' list so I did a really quick toggle for the implementation of the covered pit vs the uncovered pit but I could see this was going to get really laborious and inefficient eventually.

Some googling turned up a thread on the Unity forums talking about this implementation of a drop down list someone shared that looks promising (but I have not tried out yet).  Have you heard of any other good tutorials or drop down lists people have shared as of the 4.6 GUI rollout? I know a lot of people probably have needs in this area?

I also added some additional code to the logic of the player and monster movement that makes it so you can't step in to the same square as a component such as a brazier (there will eventually be other ones)

Above I show a shot from within the Unity editor that shows the light probes in the scene and an early version of the uncovered pit.

And then finally below I have the uncovered pit in an actual in-game screenshot that was placed with the level editor:

Right now you can walk right over them, I look forward to making the code that has you 'drop down' the pit and fall to the next level or potentially die - that should be a fun bit of code!

It was on Wednesday that I did some of these shots and Unity 5.0 was released .. so these shots are the first one's that are using a production build of Unity 5.  It was interesting because as with several of the beta builds when I loaded the project up some of the default shader properties must have changed once again and I was forced to make changes to my materials mainly in the area of the metallic and smoothness properties.

Overall though I ended up feeling like this final tweak to the shader seemed to improve the visual quality of the level just a little bit.

Another thing I've done this week is add just a little touch of ambient light to the levels.  It makes everything more 'visible' on darker screens ; but it then makes it so the level isn't quite as dark and scary so I'm not sure if I like it or not yet? It is nice to be able to see things for sure but I do want to build an atmosphere that the dungeon is a scary place so I think I will end up tweaking it down - or potentially pushing it up and down depending on if you have a light source on with your party perhaps?

The Brazier I added seems to have some problems in that it exposes the general weakness of the fire sprite I'm using at the moment (looks way too saturated and thick to me?) as seen in the shot below:

I've put that down on my list to make improvements on but for now it's a nice additional to the lighting possibilities in the level!

Finally here's a nice shot showing a pit and a brazier around a corner:

Thanks for reading, see you next week!