Hackathon 2- Basilisk

We made another game! This hackathon we came in with a very clear idea: Fight a Basilisk. Stevie's idea seemed simple enough-- wrong.

So snakes are weird animals. They're easy to put the bones into- but we wanted to rely on unity's physics engine to make the slither look right. (Our last hackathon was mostly animated interactions.) So we rigged up the snake in blender, got the mesh painted to the corresponding bones, and let unity do its thing. This was actually really impressive- but I have a feeling that we just needed to be more organized with separate bone structures. Tying the head to a single set of bones which hold animations and the rest of the body to another which take on unity's collision and linking.

The basilisk navigated the world using way points and its body slithered behind it. It has some faceted edges and a somewhat reflective texture to imitate scales when it moved. We ran into problems with the snake's orientation, it didn't mind twisting to be completely upside down sometimes.

Our biggest hangup was reflecting that ray of light though. It's a tube of light that hits a moving reflective surface. The mirror was mounted as an additional face on the shield and the light projected a blurry rectangle at the end. In order to get the rectangle to look correct when it hit a nearby / ranged object, we had to scale it based on the distance vs angle. After all of that was achieved, we could check if the light hit the snake and had a working mirror ready for the basilisk's gaze.

The original intent was to have a clever "easy win" condition (AKA Beam of Light) or a straight forward "hard win" condition (AKA wailing on it with a sword). By the time the light was working we had just enough time to get stereo sound in and rig the snake. That being said, our scope fell WAY back. - No lethal gaze from the basilisk, Not a lot of functionality of the blade, No facial animations for the snake.

Play testing revealed that controlling the beam of light was hard for certain people and insanely easy for others. We also used the side buttons on the Vive controller to emphasize holding something- most people didn't have any experience using those and kept trying to use the trigger. Next time we'd like to have had some controller bound UI show the location of the buttons if we deviate from the trigger. Also there's really not much of an advantage for us to locate the usable objects on the ground. They should be closer to reach height if we don't have a particular reason to make the player crouch to grab it.

As far as the environment goes- the world was designed to represent a culture which had fallen into disarray. Your role as the player is almost like a herculean labor, you're sent in as a human to fight these things. I wanted the malachite texture to have a glowing effect at the core to add a supernatural feel to this temple room. The oculus or skylight was designed as a square, reminiscent of James Turrell's work- it is faceted at the edge such that the depth of the roof is not visible. This drove the style of the rest of the world, using light to prescribe boundaries. I was really happy to find a way to erode the columns from a square capital to a cruciform as it met the "floating" surface. The original intent was to get a cove light working on the soffit and bottom of the ground plane in order to reiterate the uncanny "thin" profile at the oculus.

We intend to keep developing this game in our spare time and look forward to our next hackathon!!