Overview

Project Pitch

Initially Unleashed was supposed to be a battle royal between monsters in a 3D post-apocalyptic world. Each player was going to start as a small Kaiju (monster).

He will then attack other players or find “DNA” in order to evolve and become stronger. Each Kaiju will have special abilities and also a “type” like tank, bruiser, etc. The objective being to be the last standing of course.

Project constraints

  • → The project was made in ECS (now call DOTS in Unity terminology)

Project tasks

  • → UI Assets integration made by the artists.
  • → Plug UI feedbacks to the gameplay (health bar, stamina bar, etc.)
  • → Compare different way to animate the UI in Unity (Standard, Unity-UI-Extensions, render texture).

Screenshots

concept-art environment-dome environment-skull environment-war meiju-model meiju

Detailed Info

I only worked less than 2 months on this project because the scope of it has been shortened. The new pitch was the following : You play as Meiji, a powerful Kaiju who return on his origins as his childhood memory comes back. As Meiji journeys, it runs into hostile and territorial forces that try to stop it : surviving human population, AI robots and hostiles Kaiju will strew the way to her past.

As the story goes one, Meiji will learn about himself by also make decisions that could change the world he currently knows.

What I’ve done

  • HUD Integration
  • HUD Animations
  • Communicate with various member of the team with different knowledge.

ECS

I had to learn a bit what ECS means in Unity. I’d already made a project with the “Entity Component System” paradigm in the past so I knew some of the theory behind it. I still have to know more technical stuff like:

  • “You can only declare mutables types like integers, byte, etc. in Components. Arrays are forbidden.”
  • “You cannot use mathf.”
  • “You can’t have direct references between objects. You can only declare struct with a field and find the ref later on to add it to the right field.”

The UI was only made with the old GameObject methods since ECS was not ready for that yet. But I had to write code in ECS in order to gather the HUD information I needed. Basically I had a ResourceSystem and modify existing one to have extra events with UI infos (health, speed, shields, cooldowns, etc.).

Head Up Display (HUD)

The in-game HUD had those features:

Health bar Experience bar
Shield bar Rage gauge
Stamina bar Damages VFX
Abilities preview and cooldowns  

I also did some effects like a fade-in/fade-out when the HUD was not changed. I did many iterations on those aspects, without and with artists assets.