Rolling Rocks

Good morning. It's Monday again so I'm off top the office. Time to share what I've been up to over the weekend. I said I'd be starting game mechanics and I really did, but that did not result in game mechanics but in some changes to the level generation. That is because I need rocks and other small objects to appear and these need to have some physics about them and a way to interact with them. Just the meshes of the Unity terrain are not enough for that.

What I did was create a couple of rock models in Blender and hook them up to an empty game object in Unity. The model gets a collider component and a rigid body for the physics a and the parent gets a worldobject script. Then the objects are dropped onto the terrain by the generation script.

What we see here is the generated terrain with static trees and rocks that are dropped just above the ground. Some of the rocks roll down the slope and that it's intended. Buy three end, rocks will probably not be instantiated on the higher steepnesses to avoid them from rolling down, but for testing purposes I did not change that yet. Same applies to the ground textures and tree placement. That'll be fine tuned later. 

I need to make some adjustments to the rock generation. I find the rocks to be mostly too big, so I'll find a way to have the variation in size and have some big ones, but not that many. I have some ideas to get that.  

Next, I think I need to lift the terrain up a bit. Right now, most of the time, I have terrains with huge flat parts that turn into lakes. That is because the altitude script checks for a lowest possible level and sets all lower values to that. I think I can make the terrain more interesting by raising it a bit. 

After that, I hope to finally be able to start with the real game play and add characters. Those are going to be the beef of it all.