Gravity Wing

Gravity Wing is a working title for the game I’m building. This isn’t supposed to be a AAA game with a fantastic story and quests that take you to the edges of the world; it’s supposed to just give me a space to be putting together some of the techniques I’ve been learning.

Features added this sprint

  • Added in your ship!
  • Added a spacey background, so that your ship is clearly moving.
  • Added some space trash that you can click on, see a tooltip for, and then pick up.
  • Added an Inventory screen with 3 “bays”.
  • Fooled around with the camera angles.

I’m actually still miles behind even the tutorials which covered spaceship games, even so whilst the above isn’t objectively impressive, I’m quite pleased with how this is coming along. I did initially toy with the idea of just copy and pasting the tutorial space shooter but I have learnt a whole bunch in making something non-prescriptively.

I don’t actually have a gameplay idea for the game yet: no story, no mechanics. The only inspiration so far is Rey’s (Star Wars) home world job, where she’s collecting space trash and selling it. Even there, I’ve not decided if this is a “shoot through the monsters to get to the loot” or “adventure around for the loot” game. At the moment I’m following where the features I need to make will take me.

The entire game right now consists of clicking some loot, collecting it, and then checking your inventory to see that you picked it up. As you can’t close your inventory yet, that’s your end-game success screen too!

The messy first commit is actually over on Github. You can even download the game right now, if you’re on a Mac. (I only know how to build for a Mac.)

Camera

I’ve not decided that the camera will stay like this.

I started off with a simple top-down view. However, I think this view gives a bit more life to the 3d of everything.

There’s still work to be done around decided how much the camera should follow the ship. I can imagine it getting frustrating to have it flicking all over the place as you move around. Maybe separate controls for the camera? (Like the right joystick in most games.)

Bugs fixed

Constant rotation. The player should mostly always be parallel to the ground. I wrote no code to change this. However, when I decided to rotate that piece of space trash to give it a bit of a “stuck in the sand” feel, some problems arose.

Unity tries to keep the physics of an object bumping into another object quite real, which includes the fact that if you run head first into a sloped object then you’ll be pushed down (or up) a little. This made the ship go spinning like crazy.

The fix here was just to apply Infinite angular drag, so that it could spin at all like that. I’m sure this’ll come back to bit me, but I’m not sure how else to fix it until it does.

Sliding under the floor. I’ve gone ahead and constrained the player’s vertical movement, as the above bug also paused the movement to change.

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