Had a quick look at the theme and decided to join, when originally no plan.
I’ll work with my partner to make a prison escape game using the tried and true method of a catapult!

You’ll need to get the people over the wall by moving it into place, first firing a mattress over and then yourself, trying to land on the mattress before you can be home free. There will be a set amount of prisoners and you’ll need to try to help as many as possible escape.

Or at least, that’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes as I’m hoping to put in some form of ragdoll physics and I’ve not done that before.

Got my placeholder art pieces and added 2D physics to them. Fun running the game and watching them all fall about the place.
Now to try to join them up to make them into a ragdoll

First Steps

I had used box 2D a few years back to create a physics driven game, but I hadn’t really worked with physics much in Unity3D.
It was only in the last game that I worked on that I realised it had joints, and how useful those could be.

So my plan is to create some spring joints joining the appendages to the body. Then I’m hoping to run the game and see the person fall in true ragdoll fashion!

So my ragdoll progress is going really well, I’ve got (floating – because it’s easier to animate) hands connected spot on. They’re moving exactly as I had hoped!
The head though… Well I might have set it up wrong… I cannot say with confidence that no NPC was harmed in the making of this game.

If it’s a bit confusing from the placeholder art, the top circle is the head, the bigger one the body and then at the bottom are drooping hands.

Damn, Unity makes prototyping easy.

It was so quick and simple to put together a ragdoll with no prior experience (albeit, a simple model without bones or skinning).

Now to start making it so that I can actually throw my new toys!

Got back to the game and added in a rudimentary catapult.
You can load the basin with an object (such as the mattress and/or prisoner); pull back and release, firing them off. It’s already starting to look great (for me – I’m happy with how it’s turning out)

So off for sleep.
Progress seems to be going well, we can send an unlimited number of prisoners over the wall. We’ve a time limit added in so some form of gameplay is starting to take shape, instead of it just being a toy box. We seem to have a good direction. It slightly changed from before due to how it played when we got our prototype together. It’s more fun to catapult people longer distances. So now, instead of escaping a no-name prison, you’re trying to escape Alcatraz, by catapulting people across the water. And that also gave us our title: Escape Alcatraz.

Hoping to have the game “done” by the end of tomorrow. Then if we’ve time, we’ll polish on Monday.

The game’s really starting to come together. Starting to fill out the screen more so it looks a little less barren. Also added a gameover screen, which is a newspaper report of how you did. Along with that we’ve added a score, you get points based on how many prisoners escape and how many don’t. It’s not in yet, but there’ll also probably be a highscore added, because I’m personally competitive like that…

Also changed the mattress colour. After seeing the picture in the previous post, I realised it needed to be changed!