Run Doggies Run!

Overlay

This was our submission for the 2015 Global Game Jam at Abertay University!

This game was made by Julie Kennedy and myself in under 48 hours. The theme this year was “What Do We Do Now”, which resulted in a fair few co-op games like ours. The object of the game is keep running as fast as possible by jumping over flowers, and removing larger obstacles by getting the right dog in front.

Prototyping Search Nodes for Area Searching

LevelPrefabTesting

This version of the test environment has been built using a set of tile prefabs – each containing its own search nodes and walls. At this time some manual adjustment of wall placement is still required (deleting many, otherwise moving on a 0.25f grid). Construction of levels should now be much faster, and now allows some automation!

SearchNodeTesting

The white spheres represent the grid search node structure (1.0f spacing). The walls have been adjusted to match this levels layout.

NavMeshObstacle

I was able to utilize the MavMesh (once baked) to automatically detect any SearchNodes that cannot be reached, and flag them as blocked (black).

The next step will implementing the required search functionality.

Prototyping Tileset with NavMesh

NavMeshPrototyping

Before commencing further work into the implementation of a suitable method of searching the environment, I decided to build a prototype tileset. The outer loop is built out of many individual tiles – but the NavMesh correctly correctly joins them together (with a few small glitches).

If built in such a way, the tiles would be Unity Prefabs – most importantly containing the required node structure to allow for a grid search. Each ’tile’ or prefab would contain its own container of nodes, therefore allowing a general sweep of each tile before accessing the nodes within.

Current construction does not allow me to fill in the room in the middle correctly – scaling the square tile would be possible, but this would also scale any node structure later included within. I will be looking either to design the tileset a little more carefully, or include a wider range of rectangular sections to fill the gaps.