Hey guys, I had to post this quickly before the deadline because of another engagement, but I still think I should answer the prompts:
Inspiration: I've always loved the Tony Hawk games and skateboarding and wanted to make a game like that, and saw this as an opportunity to make something that was both fun and hopefully useful.
What it does: at the moment it doesn't do much. You can turn, accelerate to max speed, and ollie (jump).
How I built it: I used a mix of free assets from CG trader and some of my own. I did skateboard animations in Blender but some issues arose so those aren't in the submitted version of the game. All of the programming is Unity's usual C# scripting.
Challenges I ran into: The biggest challenge was just the time constraint. I had to drive to work in Pittsburgh Saturday so I didn't really have a lot of time to get things done. Implementation wise, though, the biggest challenge I ran into was using my animations. For some reason the root motion wasn't working correctly, and so I had to scrap the animations for the time being.
Accomplishments I'm proud of: I like the way the game looks right now. I'm also happy with the basic movement. I originally was just translating the board and camera with a fixed speed. It looked jittery so I made it accelerate into that speed, and I did the same thing with the turning; you accelerate and decelerate to and from the maximum rotational velocity.
What I learned: I learned a new way to move a character around. I'd previously only done fps style movement. This is similar in some ways, but the way that the input is handled is pretty different. I was also happy using some assets from CG trader because I know in the industry it's common to buy assets and then tweak them. I'm pretty into 3D modeling and I like to do everything myself, so this was nice because it got me to be a bit more hands off and also to learn more about setting up other people's assets.
What's next: I'm going to get the animations working. I've used Unity's animation system before so I know I can get it to work, I just was low on time this weekend. I also want to make more terrain and obstacles for the player to go through. I think grinding would be a cool addition too, especially down handrails. Originally my plan was to have pieces of entrepreneurial info around town, and at then end of the level you would take a quiz to unlock new boards and levels and things, but since the hackathon is over, I think instead I'll probably gear it more towards a point system to get the player to get to new levels.
Overall this was a fun little project to get going over the weekend and I hope you guys enjoy it!
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