New Carrot Games

Another ChatGPT app coming your way! Is the market saturated yet? I’m sure it will be before I finish this.

I’m using a new procedural roads system and it’s not cooperating. I’ve also hit a massive lack of motivation/discipline which conveniently coincided with the fam’s first vacation in about two years. My deadline for release is still EOY but I couldn’t see any way past doing this. There are several issues now:

I was able to cram two passengers into the Nomo car, but they don’t look “natural” quite yet. I had to change the car colliders as well which explains the overturned car in the background that’s slowing sinking into the asphalt. Next thing will be to tie into the passenger colliders to know if they’ve been injured.

Adding a weather system means the game can ship with more levels/puzzles, so that’s what I’m working on now. The clouds scroll and their density can be adjusted. Rain might get weird considering how it changes the visuals (I’m hoping I can just increase some specular to.. everything?)

I had to practically start over, but I think switching the project over to use the Universal Rending Pipeline was worth it. I also made some changes to better mimic the layout of MCity. Here’s what’s new:

“Tunnel” for testing sensor outages

Highway/Interstate

Dirt/Gravel Road

Section of Road With Trees

Improved Intersections With Better Traffic Light Models

Roundabout With TestTown Sculpture

I realized that these extra sections mean I can easily increase the level count. Thanks for reading!

Here’s my first try at implementing damage to the car. It’s working for the body mesh but not the bumper because I still need to combine the sub-meshes. This was just a test to see if the Impact Deformable Component could work in my project. Now I need to add some sort of smoke/sparks effect and disable/hinder the car once it takes enough damage.

Also, I’m switching to Unity’s universal rendering pipeline for improved visuals. I was using the built-in renderer which supposedly does not have the features that the new pipelines do. The first thing I’m attempting to implement with it is some basic anti-aliasing but I haven’t figured that out yet. Thanks for reading!

I’m giving myself a hard deadline of the end of the year to release this game. It’s going out in whatever state it’s in so I can move on to the next project. I can’t stop thinking of new things I want to implement, which, naturally, increases the difficulty of finishing this thing exponentially. Most software companies deal with this by implementing a product-wide feature freeze which means nothing new gets added until everything they’ve already committed to doing is tested and ready for public consumption… but I just had a really good idea that I think is important enough to include! Occupants! Self-driving cars are pretty useless if they don’t drive people around, so, I want to take the ragdolls and stick them in the car by attaching their hands and feet to the steering wheels with some basic collision detection to determine if the occupants were harmed. This also helps with the scoring system as some companies will value their occupants more than others ;).

The other idea I had was using some sort of soft body/destrictible mesh for the cars and the props in TestTown because I think people will have a lot of fun knocking stuff down and it’s a good way to determine the amount of property damage the player has incurred. However, this could take a long time to implement if I can’t find an existing system that does a good enough job.

I’m going to add these two features to the board and stop there. Honestly, if I can ship this game with just the prototypes of these features I’ll be happy. Thanks for reading!

I had to model the LiDAR unit on the Fuber (blue volvo-ish) car. The NoMo car looks a bit small and thin here, so I might change it, but the problem so far has been the Teslow car. It’s too blocky, and I haven’t found a good substitute that isn’t published under an editorial license. I’m going to try importing the prefab’s model into Blender and using a subdividing modifier on the larger meshes, starting with the wheels to see if I can increase the level of detail.

Also, something I didn’t showcase in my last post was that I changed the game’s title scene to this absurdity:

Not sure if this will end up in the final cut as it is 😉