Dodo Miscellanea

There's a fairly large pile of other stuff I worked on for Dodos over this semester. Much of it forgotten, impossible to screenshot, unused, or otherwise not worth putting a lot of effort into documenting.

Early on we decided that when the Dodos die we want them to explode into a poof of feathers. Which was easier said than done. I set about tackling that this semester by heavily modifying explosions I'd done for Nanograte. Instead of spraying sparks and smoke and other explosion-y bits everywhere they sent out a bunch of image planes of feathers. Each image plane had a physics object attached to it with another one offset by a bit. The offset object had a lot more drag than the other, which caused the plane to rotate underneath it like a pendulum. Getting that drifting motion of feathers falling. The whole thing worked great except for the part where it would cause the game to crash at random and we could never figure out why. It definitely wasn't correlated to how many of them there were or where the explosions happened. So one of the programmers went through and replaced it with a much simpler particle effect without the drifting. Not a huge loss, but I do wish we had been able to figure out what was going wrong.

I spent some time working with Charlie on the levels and sorting out how we were going to texture them. We eventually settled on downloading a Vertex Painting tool from the Unity asset store. Most of the work was his. I mostly just made sure the rock formations matched the entrance point for the dodos I'd modeled (seen below with an extremely early, temporary texture pass) and tweaked some paths a little bit. I did a fair amount of other work on the environment (trees, bushes, etc) but those assets were largely filler and window dressing so I don't feel an urgent need to document them in detail.

I also spent a lot of time talking with the engineering team about how we were going to implement certain things, like lava. Sometimes the initiative was mine, sometimes it wasn't. A number of these discussions involved other members of the team during design meetings outside of core class hours.