Two weeks ago I wound up focusing largely on assets for the Rokkit game. This week I ended up focusing on a rebuild of the player hovercraft for Hovercraft Bumper Cars. I went modular with it so I can reuse parts and create variants; a back-burner project is in-game hovercraft customization and procedurally generated hovercraft. The hull I wound up using is a basic placeholder to be upgraded and changed out later. Different hulls are a mid-range priority (and I decided to base them on the existing hulls from the demo), so I kind of skimped on the two for 27 and 28 February.
22 February: Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 0 (aka TMA-0), LOD ?
OK, I cheated. This one was monkey easy to make – it’s literally just a 1x4x9 cuboid with a texture slapped on it. But I’m a gorram nerd, and I wasn’t about to not have one of the most famous objects from science fiction history show up in a project like this. I used the proportions from the book and used feet as the base unit; feet were cited on the intarweb and the scale was right for the opening scene.
23 February: Obelisk, LOD A
A big stone pillar like the Egyptians used to build all over the place. They look cool, so why not have one or more in my toybox? They’re also pretty easy to make, so variants aren’t a problem.
24 February: Kiosk, LOD A
If you’ve been to a Renaissance Festival, you’ve seen these. It’s a little wooden freestanding storefront kiosk. Setups like this have been used by humans for thousands of years because they’re practical and relatively cheap and easy to build from common materials. I see no reason they won’t continue to be used well into the future.
25 February: Hovercraft Skirt, LOD A
A basic rubber ground-effect skirt suitable for a small hovercraft. As luck would have it, it’s got exactly the same footprint as the old player hovercraft in Hovercraft Bumper Cars. I’m debating whether or not to go in and fix the corners so they’re
26 February: Hovercraft Drive Fan, LOD A
It’s a fan. It spins, generates thrust, and pushes the hovercraft forward. I used a fancy blue paint on the cowling instead of brushed metal because I was going to put it on the player’s hovercraft and wanted the paint to match. It’s a bumper car or racecar, not some purely utilitarian thing.
The blades are a lot thicker than they should be, but that’s so they’re visible in play.
27 February: Player Hovercraft, LOD A
I made a little hull module, added the fan and skirt, and made a better version of the player’s hovercraft for my Hovercraft Bumper Cars game. It will probably get significantly larger when I do a better version of HBC, since I’m having a hard time figuring out how the pilot can cram himself in there even if there isn’t any machinery inside the hull. Now, if I decide they’re drones or robots, there’s plenty of room; maybe down the road this model will see use as a scout drone or something.
When I import it, I’ll be adding scripts to the fans to make the blade assemblies spin, a physics material to make the skirt bouncy but not the rest of the hovercraft, and a special collider to make it sit a hand’s breadth above the ground.
28 February: Hover Drone, LOD A
A replacement for the enemy hovercraft in Hovercraft Bumper Cars. The hull is more angular and a lot lower, giving it a more predatory look.