Bunny's Blobbers

The game is finished for now! We are decently happy with the outcome. There are some things we didn't get the time to implement, and we had to remove the UI because something strange happened to it. Here is a gameplay video!

Clouds as obstacles

We thought that the pegs as obstacles didn't really fit thematically to the game (they were just floating in the air) so instead of pegs we decided to add clouds. Solid clouds! That the blobbers will collide with. :) We found some free nice low poly clouds that we have added to the game level. We have been working on getting everything to work with the clouds. We ran into some problems with the blobbers that use NVIDIA FleX again. When the blobbers collide with the clouds they might bounce in any direction. But we don't want the blobbers to move in Z-direction because then it's impossible to catch them. This was an easy fix for the non-FleX blobbers, we just locked their movement in Z-direction. But if we did this to the FleX-blobbers they stopped working. What we did was that we made the hitboxes of the clouds cylinder shaped and really long in Z-direction. This solves the problem most of the time but not completely, but it seems to work good enough! This means that the cloud hitboxes don't match the cloud models completely, but they are kind of soft on the edges and hard on the inside, it looks okay and it does the job! We made spawners and scripts for the clouds, so they will spawn and move across the screen, two at a time in opposite direction at random intervals and random speeds.

It's starting to come together

Jenna has made textures and materials for the bunny and dress (which we decided to keep even though the cloth simulation didn't work out..), added a background image, tweaked the lighting, tweaked the blobber materials (mainly gave them new colors) and added a particle effect for when the player catches a blobber.

Anton has implemented score counting and a basic UI. He has also been working on adding some kind of obstacles to the level. We realized that if the player catches all the blobbers, they will not see the simulations.. So we want to add some obstacles like pegs or something to make the blobbers collide with these first before reaching the bucket or the ground. We came up with all kinds of ideas for these obstacles, some of them could be like rotating stars, some of them could create a little explosion when a blobber hits them, adding a force to the blobber. But these will have to be stretch goals, the most important thing is that we get some kind of obstacles there.

Soft body bunny ears and cloth bunny dress

We have worked on implementing the bunny's ears as soft bodies and creating some clothing for it to try out the NVIDIA FleX cloth actor. To make the bunny's ear soft body we first had to make the ears separate 3D models. Then we used the ear models to make a soft body actor with NVIDIA FleX. Then we just placed the ear objects under the head bone of the bunny's rig and locked the particles at the bottom of the ears to make them stay in place. And this actually worked as we thought it would! However, the ears were very wobbly which weren't how we had imagined them. We tried to tweak the settings of the soft body and lock some more particles but that didn't help much. It's quite amusing but at least one of us is sceptical about keeping these ears for the final version of the game.. :)

We have also tried to use the same technique but with a cloth actor on a dress that Jenna added to the bunny model. But this proved to be harder than we thought... It kind of almost works, but for some reason the dress gets a little bit rotated when starting the game, even though we have lined up everything perfectly in t-pose. Of course, the bunny also rotates in its idle and moving animations, but we would think that the dress would just follow and not rotate strangely? Anyway there is a bigger problem. The collisions are probably not updating fast enough which makes the dress clip through the bunny when moving fast. It's frustrating because it looks like it could work and it looks quite cool when not moving too fast and if the dress wouldn't rotate strangely. We were thinking about doing some simpler clothing like a bow or cape instead, but we'll see if we will have time for that.

Blobber despawn bug

We encountered a bug that happened quite frequently when playing the game that would make the game crash. It took quite some time before we were able to pin down the problem, we had to peel away everything in the game until we only had two blobbers left and we could recreate the bug. We have a script that deletes the blobbers from the scene a while after they have hit the ground. What happened was that if a blobber is being deleted and another blobber using NVIDIA FleX is still colliding with it, the game would crash. To solve this we added code to one of the scripts that counts the number of FleX-blobbers that are close to the blobber that is about to be deleted (using triggers), and if it is close to a FleX-blobber it will wait a while and then check again, and only delete if there are no FleX-blobbers near it.

We also had some troubles implementing the triggers for catching blobbers and colliding with the ground. Normally we would want to have a trigger in the bucket that registers, for example, a catch if a blobber collides with it. But because of NVIDIA FleX we can't get the tag of the blobbers when they enter a trigger, so we don't know what kind of blobber was caught. Instead we had to add a trigger as a child to each blobber and have that trigger keep track of the collisions instead. These seems like quite unnecessary work-arounds but we have searched the documentation of NVIDIA FleX and haven't found anything that would help.

Glass simulation

Glass blobber For the glass blobbers we didn't use NVIDIA FleX but just Uniy's built in physics system and tweaked the settings. When working with this one we learned something interesting! We could get the glass blobber to look heavy and hard by itself, without modifying the mass. But when the glass blobber collided with a balloon blobber it would bounce off the balloon and fly away. But that's not how glass would interact with a balloon! The balloon should be pushed away by the glass. So it was important to make sure the glass blobber is heavier (mass) than the balloon blobber.

Styrofoam simulation

It was a bit tricky to create the styrofoam simulation.. Maybe because we weren't completely clear on what we were aiming for. We didn't have any styrofoam to study in the same way as the balloon, and we weren't sure if styrofoam should be a little bouncy or not. For the styrofoam blobbers we used NVIDIA FleX solid actor and tried to tweak the settings to make them look very lightweight.

Balloon simulation

It was really interesting to implement the balloon blobber physics. At first we just tried to make the balloons light and bounce against the ground. We created a bouncy physics material on the ground to achieve the bouncing. But balloons going in a straight line towards the ground didn't feel right. Luckily we had balloons at hand that we could study! So we looked at a real balloon and tried to think about how to mimic its movements. It kind of moves randomly and doesn't bounce that much. We figured out that wind/air resistance is what makes the balloon really move like a balloon, so we need to simulate that. We wrote a script that makes the balloon blobber spin around itself and also move a little bit randomly left or right. And now we are quite satisfied with the balloon blobbers! We think they look ballony enough!

Jelly simulation

We have started working on the simulations! First off are the jelly blobbers. These were easy to create using NVIDIA FleX but the result is so satisfying, they are so wobbly! We used the soft body feature of NVIDIA FleX. The second gif in the image reel to the left is a funny bug we got when a jelly blobber got stuck.

Bunny and despawning and catching blobbers

Jenna has created a 3D model, materials, rig and animations for the bunny character with the bucket and Anton has implemented scripts for despawning blobbers after they have hit the ground and catching blobbers in the bucket.

Project board

Here is an image showing our project board on GitHub. We have tried to think about everything we need to implement and created issues with different tags: Simulation, 3D graphics, 2D graphics, Level design, VFX, Gameplay and UI. We have divided all the issues in three levels of priority, high, medium and low priority / stretch goals. We think this setup will be useful when working on the project.

First models and scripts

Jenna has created 3D models for the bucket and the blobbers, and materials for the blobbers (borrowing some free to use shaders and textures) (image 1 to the left). I sent the image of the blobbers to my family and asked what materials they think they look like, here are some of the answers (from left to right):
(Balloon) - glossy fabric that pillows might have
(Jelly) - shiny Christmas tree ball material / glass
(Styrofoam) - fine concrete or stone / styrofoam (!)
(Glass) - silk fabric as in a Lucia headband
Making the materials look right was evidently not that easy! Hopefully the simulations of the behavior of the materials will make them more recognizable.

Anton has implemented basic movement for the character, a spawner for the blobbers (image 2) and set up the main scene.

A change of direction!

When searching for different ways to implement soft body simulations we found this video where they use a plugin for Unity called NVIDIA FleX to create soft body tetris blocks. We were so inspired by the shiny wobbly tetris blocks so we want to try out the NVIDIA FleX plugin! Since just making some soft body cubes using an existing framework seems too trivial we have decided to give the simulations a purpose in a game. We came up with the idea of a simple game where the player will catch jelly candies in a bucket. Then we built on this idea and, to create a bit of a challenge for us regarding simulations, there will be objects (that we call blobbers) of different materials that the players will catch. We tried to think of a number of different materials that have distinct properties and so far we have decided on jelly, glass, styrofoam, balloon and water balloon. The focus of the project will be to create simulations for these different materials and use them in a game, and game design will be secondary. The are some sketches for the game in the image reel to the left.

Trying a different approach

We have implemented a first version of a jelly simulation by following a tutorial and tried it out on some basic shapes. They are not quite behaving as we want though so we will have to do some tweaking to see if we can get it to work out. As seen in the gif, the sphere is wobbling nicely while the cylinder seems quite stiff. Jenna made a gummy bear 3D model and tried the jelly simulation on those too.

Generating and manipulating a cube mesh from vertices.

We have started exploring the possibility of manipulating a cube mesh using a spring-damper system. Today we have managed to create a cube mesh using a Vector3 array of vertices and an integer array of points describing triangles (polygons). Since in Unity every vertex in a cube (8 vertices) consists of 3 points (one for each face-normal), we had to find which three points correspond to which indexes in the vertex array. Last but not least, we also tried manipulating one of two of the cubes vertices using a sinus function updating both the cube mesh and the mesh-collider to see if it worked as we intended. Which it did! 🎉

Jell-O!

We will hopefully simulate some fancy bouncy jelly cubes. We are quite worried to say the least.