Spider Garden alpha
This farming/TOD/Siege Tank is quite fun
Elefantopia
RSSYesterday I was refining the volcano on the ipad and started to make the look of the other spawners more uniform, the basic spawn point is now un underground mother that cracks through the planet’s crust. It may be interesting game play wise to make these vulnerable while they’re spawning, we will see.
Map and Research switching animation of the new 3D GUI
New shop UI, animates from folded to expanded, on the right, the holo-projector displays the spider-robot
Elefantopia meets Spider Garden … end of level ally
8 day flash project for a contest fiaf organized by unity
We can now research !
Research unlocks abilities like uprgade as well as building.
We can already do research tree but the UI is still a linear list.
@ level 5 you build a research shack and one of the first thing you can unlock is upgrade. Upgrade allow you to connect upgrade modules to any building. Research takes some time so the first upgrade we’re going to buy is the Speed.
What is this ?
It’s a combination between a spiritual foundation, vedic columns, a minaret and spires
Beta 5 hot out of the oven !
- you can add friends and visit their islands
- chat
- refined UI
- new dragging (tell us what you think)
- title load screen
- many many bug fixes
softer look for the elefant
construction pushed to the max
Alpha 4 is a huge release and it’s out !!
It is starting to tell the story of this island and this elefant, in fact there are so many changes, amongst them
- new look for the UI more breezy and friendly (we hope)
- streamlined interaction with your elefant who becomes your advisor as well as your pet
- new feeding mechanic
- more colorful and happy colors
- brand new mission and in-game tutorial with arrows
- much much faster
It is still closed because it is a bit rough and you will lose your world but if you like testing things out before they are in the wild, you are welcome to apply for the next alpha.
Musing on whale transportation
elefantopia alpha 1 is live
A few people accessed the first public version of the game.
We are very excited about what is coming next, on Monday we start working on gameplay, balancing the missions and dialogue type briefing and … a few secret things.
Here is a screenshot of 30 minutes into the game
elefantopia title and why Unity3D is really really good
Tomorrow is alpha release. Fraser is rigging the UI for the mixer which we use in the elefant as well as the bakery. I I am finishing the title screen.
After only 4 hours of work I have a working version and looking back I realize how awesome Unity3D is.
Here is the workflow :
I have this photoshop image I mocked up a long time ago from some paper drafts and proceed to convert it to a 3D scene.
My plan is to use as little 2D as possible because I already have all the 3D models and their memory footprint is smaller. I start dicing the photoshop image but I want to maintain each texture to 64 pixel because the final game is on a webplayer and we are paying for bandwidth, funny how now every bit counts. So I use ex2D borders for the background ramp and an overlay using an additive shader to set the color. But the result is too desaturated so I revert to a square ramp texture from photoshop and the round borders are sprites instead, one in each corner.
Once this is done, I place the elefant for composition, dice the white progress bar, sprite the earth and make a few rocks to indicate its rotation.
I then drag and drop a few buildings : factory, algae purification plugin, a few trees and a couple spiritual buildings.
A couple hours later I have a title.
I then move over to my tablet PC and sketch a few titles with the amazing ArtRage, dropbox it over to the mac and place it in the scene as a ex2D sprite.
A few lines of code to slow down the run animation of the elefant and rotate the planet and its buildings and we have the almost final title.
I look at the photoshop mockup and I see the red,green,blue glow is missing. So I then drag and drop a model I use for fake shadows, it’s a tesselated disc with vertex colors, replace the shader by a particle additive, which doesn’t read vertex color so I apply a shadow texture and change its color within the shader and voila, I have 3 glows.
Unity was stable, consistently fast and the workflow so unobstructive that it is finished in a breeze.
Here is the result. What do you think ?
(click me)
About Elefantopia
Revive your islands by building and growing the right stuff, together with your friends and your pink elefant.
