Click to Color

I was needing something simple to work on (the day job has turned my brain to mush) so I spent a few hours last week polishing a tool that I've used in the production of Fracture the Flag. The tool allows the creation and editing of color palettes within Unity.

Low poly scene and the 

Click To Color

interface

The use of color palettes along with flat shaded low poly assets allows a significant reduction in the number of materials being used in a scene or project. This can also reduce draw calls and improve performance.

Due to the flat shading models can be unwrapped and the UV's can be stacked. This allows the texture size to be very small - in theory as small as one pixel per color used in the project! This means that by using a 32 by 32 pixel texture a project can have up to 1024 colors contained in a 4 kb file! Ideal for mobile uses or simply keeping a desktop build size down to something reasonable.

Unwrapped model in Blender

The editing of these textures within Unity also allows the artist or developer to quickly adjust colors of models in a scene while lighting and image effects are shown in real time. This speeds up development time as there is less back and forth between Unity and a photo editing program.

Click To Color will be available on the Unity Asset Store:  https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/72930

All the features of Click to Color can be seen in the video below.

A potential work flow using Unity and Blender is shown in the second video.

Unity Object Swapper

A while back I found myself looking at a Unity scene with several hundred trees that each needed to be updated and the connection to the prefab had somehow broken... Rather than spent hours replacing each one I spent almost as much time writing an editor extension to do the same thing.

I'd forgotten about the tool, until a student of mine ended up in a similar position. Which made me revisit the tool a do just a bit of fine tuning.

Screenshot of the editor window

It's a pretty simple script, but handy all the same. If I find the time I might add it to the Unity Asset Store as a free asset. Until then, assuming this looks like useful, you can download it from this link (box). There's no documentation, but it should be pretty self explanatory- the search is case sensitive.

Testing Single Player Combat

The next major goal for Fracture the Flag is adding to the single player challenges with the addition of some basic combat oriented levels. The new levels will continue to be time based - how fast can you take out the AI base. It will not be a full blown single player campaign - as a solo dev it’s just not possible to pull that off so I won’t promise what I can’t deliver.

Testing of the new scripts was recently done live on Twitch. The stream was also reposted on YouTube.

 AI bases will have a functional economy to support their attacks on the player’s base. If there’s no ammo then the siege weapons will fall silent. If build points run dry the AI can’t recruit more workers or swordsman…

 The AI will not be capable of adding new building or siege weapons. The AI base is largely static, once a player destroys a building, siege weapon, or flag it’s gone. However, workers and swordsman will be replaced.

 The AI is capable of both offense and defense. Sending groups of swordsman to attack buildings and delivering bombs to the base of flags and other buildings. Defensively swordsman will patrol or stand and guard. Siege weapons will also fire if you get too close.

AI Controlled Bombers

There are lots of little bugs and plenty of balancing to work on. So no promises on a release date. The first release will likely be on the beta channel as many scripts have been adapted to allow the AI which will then need testing to ensure multiplayer didn’t break…