Day 2

On day 2 I mainly focused on trying to get enemies into the game, and implement the combat system. To start with I created a basic fleeing enemy system using the reaper character, this system will tell if the player is in range of the character, and then using the Navmesh will flee. It is a very simple AI, but I wanted the player to actually be a reaper, so there were going to be enemies who were scared of the player. Then I needed enemies who would fight back, so I made another script for these enemies, they will do the opposite and will chase the player if he gets in range, and if you get even closer will shoot you.

This was all well and good with just the reaper and basic spheres as the bullets, but I decided that I needed actual enemies. So I took to researching, and found inspiration in Alice in Wonderland. I took this as inspiration and made a base concept of what I wanted, which was an enemy that was a playing card that could run away, or fight you off by shooting you.

Having done this I decided to make a difference between the suits, and changed the way the hats looked, a very simple change but one that, when mixed with the colour and suit changes would make the enemies a bit more interesting (note, I used the same card template and only changed the hat, I was a bit pushed for time and didn't really need the individual suits drawn out like that):

That done, it was now time to start modelling. I modelled the basic shapes of the card with legs, being sure to control the subdivision level, I didn't want to make it too high poly in game, and I didn't want it too low poly that the animation didn't work well. Then I got to work on the heads, I created these separately and merged them at a later date. I started them by making one base head shape for the face area, and making sure to keep the rest of the neck so I would not need to redo it for each character.

With the modelling done, I decided to UV unwrap the character, as this would be important for some sense of optimisation, I made sure to have all the materials done in one UV map so that you would only need one material, then to make it work a bit differently, I used the same method as with the Reaper, and made sure to save the front face as a different material, so that you could change the cards suit and number without affecting the rest of the texture and without needing so much repetition.

I then created a procedural method for making the back of the cards and masked it off, changed the rest of the material to white with black for the areas like the head and feet. At this point I was planning on doing a face for the character, so I made a mistake I would choose against in hindsight, I separated the suits by colour and made 2 different maps for them. The reasoning was that I wanted to invert the colour scheme between them, so clubs and spades would have a red details, and diamonds and hearts would have black details, so I wanted a larger area to paint on, and if I kept them in one map I would have to shrink the area by at least half. I changed this after a while and just went with glowing red and black eyes, but kept the materials as two separate ones as I had wasted too much time at this point.

I then did something very stupid and wasteful. I painted each individual cards face, now I used a stencil so it didn't waste so much time, only taking 45 minutes or so, but it was very wasteful as I didn't use all of them in game, I had planned on it, but didn't have time in the end. 

I also made two joker cards, but they were never used:

Next I rigged the cards, I made sure to optimise this process by disconnecting the hats off all the cards, and only weight painting the one card, and then duplicating it after the fact.

For animating this, I was trying to follow the Alice in Wonderland reference, or rather the very over the top Disney style animation with a lot of follow through and squash and stretch, I think I may have made them a bit too wobbly, but I think they turned out okay.

Next was projectiles, I just made some basic suit shapes, with as few polygons as  I could get away with. In engine I used the same material as the centre suit for the players centre suit. As for why I didn't just use the same shape from the players... I forgot I had that done and just redid it... oops.

After that I put them in game, set up their AI and tested it. It seemed to work fine, but the version of the AI I was using was simple, so I made it a bit better, combined a bunch of scripts, set up their health, set up the player attacks to damage them, and set a bool that changes how the player interacts, fleeing or attacking, and then finished up. After testing this out I found the player a bit boring, so decided to give a quick particle effect, and made the glowing scythe with the trail effect.

That was day 2.

Resources and Tutorials used: