Progress on Frick, Inc. is going well and it's estimated release date is either end of the month, or very early next month. Currently most work is being done on the core mechanics, levels and what I like to call 'boring stuff' like menus, technical things and behind-the-scenes stuff.

Levels

Levels for the game are created in SketchUp, which is my tool of choice for creating 3D models. The source files are loaded into Unity directly and then each object is processed through a system.

The system will replace crude objects (like the blue trigger zones, the triangles for starting positions) with prefabs when loading the level. This makes it easy to create a multitude of levels, no need for a custom level editor plus because it's based on prefabs models and functions can change even when a number of levels have already been produced.

Tasks

Each level consists of tasks the player has to complete. This could be parking a certain vehicle at a particular spot, or delivering goods. The tasks are listed by the same system used for loading the levels.

If the system encounters a trigger zone for parking vehicles it'll add that to the list of tasks for that level plus keeps track whether the task has been completed.

If all tasks are complete, the player wins the level.

Vehicles

Similar to levels vehicles are also created using SketchUp. Each components of a vehicle is grouped and separate from the main body, this way they can easily be animated (the body moving up and down while moving around) or explode by dynamically adding rigidbodies to each separate component of the model.

Stay tuned for a new development blog next week!