We felt that the woods were a bit empty, so we added wildlife. This again led to lots of needed refinements in our spawning system, NPC behaviour, animations and landscape detection (we don’t want bunnies fall through the landscape or jump through trees). As all variables are randomized and the rabbits are not placed manually in the landscape, the system must support whatever happens and solve all possible issues. For example, sometimes the bunnies are spawned in very cramped spaces from which it is impossible to move. We detect this and remove these bunnies immediately, so that they can be respawned on a better position straight away.
Bunnies also need to be able to hop, so we implemented a simple jump system. This too is a bit more complicated than it sounds: bunnies jump at random, so the jump must work everywhere. Our world does not use kinetics, amongst other reasons because kinetics result in avatars being able to shove eachother away, which we find very unnatural. So gravity, jump force et cetera all had to be implemented manually.
Also, a very nasty bug during swimming has been solved: under water fog would simply disappear, so that it looked like the player was swimming in thin air. This turned out to be an issue in the water module itself in combination with Unity’s Post Processing Stack 2 that we are using: fog would only be displayed in the editor and not in the build. As building each iteration takes about 5 minutes or so, it took a lot of time to nail this one, as the game’s behavior in the editor was different from its behavior outside the editor!
All of this still needs some refinement, but we feel confident enough now to show you a video!
The music in the video is a placeholder. This piece is called Sobo; it is composed by Naoki Saito.
