Map Test 5c (Patreon)

Hey guys! It’s my birthday today, so I figured I’d give you something different to celebrate. Here’s Map Test 5c.

It’s from April 29th, 2021. At that point in time, it was a year into the lockdowns and the pandemic, I was slowly moving forward with my graphic novel and feeling a bit cut loose from reality, so I wanted to see where I could apply the 3D skills I had been working on.

So I downloaded the latest version of Unity, watched a million tutorials and started trying to learn about game development stuff. Basically, learning to learn, seeing what I found interesting and following those leads with no expectations. So after a bunch of iterations, here’s this one:

http://joncairns.net/Hazard/Tests/MapTest5c2/index.html

(I had to make this play in Chrome WebGL, but my computer is also 9 years old, so you might have better luck with your browsers of choice but it'll likely only work on a desktop computer.)

WASD or Arrow keys to move

Mouse to move camera

Hold shift to run

Spacebar to jump

E to toggle companion’s illumination

Map Test 5c was the final iteration of a series of, well, map tests. Game development has so many variables that each time I’d pick one to focus on with a full test, I’d have 7 or 8 ideas for the next one. So it was really the most refined of a series of experiments in creating a 3D play space using things I’d made or found.

I can’t promise you that it’s fun, or stable, or won’t just crash on you, but it’s an interesting artifact, I think. In this iteration, I was focused on pulling together more C# scripting than I was really prepared for, but I figured it would be more interesting to fail anyway.

From what I can remember, 5c was supposed to have an accelerated Day-Night cycle, a companion you could illuminate to make the dark a lot less dark, my 3D models of ogres and the player character working with canned animations, some custom shaders, island geography/geometry built around an actual island’s altitude data, wind affecting trees and grass, falling leaves, and some strange rectangular boids that I believe return to the largest tree on the island at nighttime.

Lots of assets were kindly taken from speed tree, the unity store, and lots of C# tutorials on youtube and forums. So credit to those for being the glue to make this stick together.

This is also an interesting experiment because the Player Character is based on a model I made in Blender from a Wilfrith turnaround drawing, with the hovering greyhound supposed to be a stand in for Wilfrith’s bat as seen in Wilfrith and the Golem Stonemason. I’d say that Map Test 5c was instrumental to helping me clarify a lot of ideas needed to make that particular comic, even if only in the abstract sense. This directly led into the Wilfrith stories.

I’d love to have the time to go back and and make a Map Test 6, but that’ll be a future project, and probably one after I’ve bought a new computer eventually. I’d also like to distance myself from Unity, but that’s a different conversation.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy running around as Wilfrith and playing around with this weird little garden I made.