Northwards of Roswell. Update 3

Northwards of Roswell... The Movie? :)

After a lot of sweat, blood, tears and enormous amounts of self motivation, I am extremely happy to bring you the next update of Northwards of Roswell. I got really into the AI of the game and brought it to the next level with the implementation of the combat mechanics! At the moment, the combat follows the rules of traditional melee combat in 3D RTS games.

Why I spent so much time implementing this part of the game? First of all, I stopped to use the Rain Plugin. The behaviour trees didn't work for me. Sadly, the plugin is very ambitious and wants to be a all-in-all tool for your games. It proves to be useful in static situations but when you start to make complicated dynamic stuff and combine it with other systems you will need to dig into the superficial documentation they provide. Sooner or later you may find a blocking wall of errors and will decide to drop it off your project. :(

I also spent some amount of time exploring the latest Unity 4.6 Beta. I will definitively use the new gui and event system when implementing the GUI of the game. Finally I also struggled a bit trying to make a flexible enough unit system for the game based on prefabs.

The big family of hybrids in Northwards of Roswell.

I learnt that looking too far into the future is a bet that I don't really want to take again, since a big amount of work can be thrown away in early prototype stages. All in all, creating the unit system was itself a valuable experience, so I don't regret :)

Another important lesson I learnt is that you should keep the scale of the GameObjects in your game. If you don't do it you will find all kind of spooky effects when trying to use colliders, rigidbodies and Character Controllers. I don't recommend the Character Controller neither, since it combines multiple component behaviours and breaks the single responsibility principle.


Enough talking, let's see the goodies! :D

 Behold the godly power of unit spawning! :D

Units start to be intelligent. It's like watching your baby growing up :,)

That chicken didn't stand a chance against the glitched dogs! :O

The demo now includes AI and combat in addition to the previous features! :)

And the demo. Is it easy to break? I am afraid so... xD If you find a funny glitch or something worth sharing, please do! ^^

Click here to play the demo in higher resolution.

Thank you! If you haven't already, you can follow the project on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

How should the units behave in the game? Should they fight or run? What other units you would like to see? We would very happy to hear your impressions and opinions! :)