Author: Flying Banana

I found it! I found the source of the image which motivated me to build the current 3D tilemap! The above image floated in my search results whenever I typed in “Unity 3D tilemap” and I just couldn’t find its source!

It is from the Isometric Pack 3d asset made by Manufactura K4. I’ve included another asset preview from the asset store. Aren’t they just beautiful.

In fact, I can probably use my 3D tilemap system with this asset to layout a mock level pretty easily! Maybe. After I fix another bazillion bugs.

Coding

I converted the player controller from 2D to 3D! Most of the logic still made sense, and I got to delete a lot of disgusting code I originally wrote to make 2D work like 3D (yep, the code sounded as ridiculous as that statement). This actually didn’t take very long.

…what took very long was all the bugs *ahem* unexpected behaviors *ahem* interesting features in my code. Mostly to do with the quirks of serialization in Unity. Finding why it was doing what it did took a long time. Figuring out what to do with the code took a long time. Moving code around to correct its behavior took a long time. Fixing more interesting features as a result of moving code around took a long time…

The end result: once again I got a character moving in the game, but this time in a 3D tilemap!

For the next two weeks, I’ll be implementing ramps and finer control over tile collisions in a tile set. I see more code moving coming my way…

Art

I think I’ve convinced Y to start drawing some comic shorts on the back stories of the characters of the game. I anticipate incoming awesomeness.

Narrative

I recently watched the Saga of Tanya the Evil Movie, and I couldn’t help myself analyzing the plot. It’s summarizable in a few sentences. Literally only a few things happen in the film, sandwiched between a lot of fancy fight scenes.

Perhaps I don’t really need to make the plot of the game super complicated either?

I wrote up a bunch of significant events in the plot of the game, and that took a whole page. Will the game take 100 hours to play?

Well that’d be exciting.

I had just a week to work on the game before TI9 began and consumed all my spare time. To make up for this, I decided to write a section on the lore of the game in every update!

Coding

Spent most of my time bug-fixing.

I managed to push seven commits and closed out a bunch of issues. The 3D tilemap is now functionally a superset to Unity’s own 2D tilemap, with extra features such as saving tiles to disk and loading them seamlessly, so not everything is saved to the scene. Reaching this milestone makes me quite happy, so I’ll show it off in a few more GIFs below.

Not really focused on the tiles in the tile set, so they look a bit like water-downed version of Minecraft. Y is working on some textures for the prototype tiles, though!

The next step is to get a working character controller ready so we can move around in the tilemap. This also means implementing a tile-based collision and ramp system. Fun!

Narrative

Since I’m also writing the story, I guess I’ll put out bits and pieces of lore of the game.

Humans have populated the Continent for well over twelve hundred years now. Hamlets became villages, villages formed towns. Countries rose and fell, buried in the sands of time. The Antima Empire, with a mere two centuries of history, is a new player on the stage of continental politics. Its founding father, Lepton Antima the Wayward, sacrificed his own life to establish a powerful barrier to deter all forms of magic in the Empire. This double-edged sword repelled countless invasions from the neighboring states, at the cost of the country’s own magical advances.

It is in this country that our protagonists, Edge and Abigail Seed, begin their journey as a duo with one who aspires to become the Demon King, and one who wants to stop him.

Excerpt from The Chronicles of Edge and Abigail Seed – Volume I

Excited to finally write about the game!

After nearly two months of work on a 3D tilemap system for Unity, it is finally at a presentable stage. I gave a short tutorial for my artist Y over Duo and she created the above scene with the placeholder tile set I created. Slightly disappointed that we are using this to mimic 2D tilemap (with correct height information), but I suppose it might come in handy later on.

This will be the first piece of code that will make into the final game, I hope. It was both traumatic and liberating when I deleted four-month worth of code I wrote specifically to extend Unity’s 2D tilemap system for our game, only to find it too lacking on a fundamental level. I hope I’ve done things right this time around.

The tilemap system is still bug-ridden and feature-lacking. Once the core system is complete, I need to figure out a way to encode ramps and ladders into it, as well as writing a character controller on top of it. Fun things lie ahead!

On the other side Y has been drawing out character portraits. Here’s a finalized portrait.

It has been a little over a year since I started brainstorming Project Theta with my artist friend. It is finally in semi-production – a state where progress is no longer abstract.

I figured documenting the making of the game would be pretty cool. After all, it has been a year and we are still pretty much as motivated as we were when we started. It would be interesting to see how the game came to be.

We have bi-weekly status updates, and I’ll try to write about the progress after every meeting.