Realities Adrift – Devlog [26/05/2022]

This initial devlog will cover the initial progress made on my game “Realities Adrift” – to learn more about the fundamentals of the game itself, feel free to read the GDD which covers the fundamentals of the game. 

Currently, there isn’t a huge amount of progress to speak of, since the game is only currently in the early stage of production but I will be showing some of the work completed so far.

Creating the characters

Due to myself not being a great modeller, rigger or animator, investing time into character modelling with manual rigs and animations for every model was not viable. With this in mind, I opted to use tools to support building the characters, and after finding Vroid Studio (a tool that specialises in building anime-style characters) and its corresponding marketplace, I was able to quickly and effectively build multiple unique characters for use in my game, with some being quest givers, and some being planned playable characters.

Click on the image below to view the gallery of Vroid characters made for the game.

Importing to engine

Getting the models from Vroid into Unity and usable with the current systems within the game posed some small challenges, but these were fairly easy to overcome and will be detailed below.

UniVRM

Interestingly, Vroid doesn’t natively support FBX exports or any export that natively works with unity, which means I had to find an alternative way of getting them usable for my game.

I found UniVRM – a tool that imports the VRM file exported from Vroid into Unity as a usable prefab.

The model then needed some work, such as having all of the materials have my anime shader applied to allow the models to look cohesive with the rest of the world, as well as setting up the character for use in my project which will be discussed further below.

Setting up the character

Setting up the character is fairly simple but still requires a lot of trial and error, I essentially take another prefab with everything setup, move over the model to this prefab, replace the animation controller, and place empty items in the hierarchy of the model for weapons to attach to, with some trial and error needed to get the correct transform and rotation for the weapon to fit the hands well. 

Basic features in-game

Currently, the features available to play in-game are all present but only in a basic form, so you can pick the characters you like but all play the same, with combat needing some work and levels needing to be designed.

For my next devlog, I hope to have a small gameplay video to show the features currently implemented.