We built more foundation for our crazy evolution game this month:

• Functional evolution UI (not pretty, yet)
• Wrangling creature postures, UVs, and more
• Figuring out rendering pipelines, lighting, etc
• Evaluated a TON of options for creating terrain in Unity

Ta-da! We can now equip creature parts from a user interface. This was a LOT harder than it looks and caused my programmer significant headaches.

Swapping parts in the creature UI

Replacing individual parts turned out to be an absolute nightmare. Hot-swapping in something like a new to a live creature, then you have to rotate, scale, parent, initiate and correct for any problems in all the connected parts.

The breaking point for us was, surprisingly, the wings. Turns out wings had very different IK constraints from other parts, and they were flipping around all over the place and, somehow, causing Unity to crash. 

At that point, we just decided to regenerate the entire creature. It’s incredibly fast to do so and has no drawbacks — so basically we just wasted time fiddling with individual part replacements.

Getting creature posture right

We’re still building the ruleset for creatures. It’s pretty funny to see a crocodile suddenly plunge its head into the ground because the wrong arms are equipped. Well, it’s funny the first 20 times. We’ve done this before. It just requires a ton of rule-making to eventually get it right. 

The gif on this post shows an example of posture done right: a crocodile torso with no arms now angles up to stay balanced, but has a cool-kid slouch when it’s strolling along. We’re also fiddling with stuff like the mesh UVs to ensure that everything is properly textured.

Post-processing silliness

I want the UI to look pretty professional early on, so I also tackled Unity’s rendering pipeline to figure out how to throw a blur and vignette on the background without affecting the creature. This is surprisingly difficult because Unity doesn’t allow post-processing compilation. The preferred solution (at least for 2021 LTS) seems to be cam stacking, which I don’t love, but I’m not going to fight Unity for more than day on this kind of thing.

Terrain

Speaking of Unity frustrations, the built-in terrain tools are outdated and mostly a pain to work with. On this one I didn’t waste any time trying — I just went shopping. After studying all the alternatives, I settled on a new-ish package called Microverse. It’s great. If you’re using Unity it’s worth checking out.