Overview - Early in the quarter I found a really cool 3D model of Mickey Mouse that I knew I wanter to use. For the final project I created a basic game where the player can control Mickey and his boat avoiding the rocks and the Hippos. The game uses WASD to move the boat around the game area.
Image 1: Top-down view of the game world.
1. To create the collision for the tree barrier, I used the very simple solution that the boats coordinates could not pass the trees. For the rocks I used their bounding box so that the boat cannot go through them. I ran out of time and was uanble to figure out the proper way of doing collisons for the hippos.
2. My intial plan was to use the model of Mickey as my Hierarchical model. The initial plan was to have his arms moving like he was steering the ship. This movement was impossible to see with the camera setup, so I added a dummy model waving it's arms in a "Help Me" kind of way. Towards the end of the project, I found that the boat's movement was really lagging, in an effort to fix this I removed some extra parts including Mickey's animation, as it wasn't noticeable in the first place and put him in a static pose.
Image 2: Front-view of the ship and the Mickey model.
3. For my technology, I used the particle system from lab 9. I used this particle system to create black particles that represent smoke coming out of the smokestack of the boat when it moves. This effect worked properly when I imported the lab code into the project. However after some changes were made to implement other parts of the program, the effect now causes an error. The image below shows how the effect should have looked in the project
Image 3: Smoke particles emitting from the Steamboat.
If I had more time I would have liked to fully implement the collision detection for the hippos including using a text counter to count the amount of times a player ran into a hippo. Another change I would have made would be to add some more varied movement to the hippos (perhaps one that circles arourd rocks) in effort to force the player to move. Another way to conbat this issue would be to constanly make the boat move forward so that the player can't simply stay in one safe place.