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An Ergastulum is a building used to hold in chains dangerous slaves, or to punish other slaves. The Ergastulum is subsurface and large enough to allow the slaves to work within it and containing narrow spaces in which they sleep.

Post feature Report RSS From Blender to Unity: Creating a New Exit Gateway & Xbox Controller Support

Just a summary of replacing the Exit gates in the game with Portals and adding Xbox controller support.

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Since the beginning of the development of the game, I have been hesitant on replacing the Exits in the game which were simply a hold in the ground with white smoke rising out of it.

The introduction of Portals was the turning point where I decided that this theme should be used throughout the game.

Blender

Creating the portal in Blender was straight forward enough and I modified one of the old unused Crypts that I made for the Graveyard level.

portal blender

I also scattered around the base one of the older kitparts I made for the "pentagram" pieces which included the Air, Water, Earth, Fire and Spirit symbols. These can be seen on the outer circle above.

Unity

Once I was happy with the basic pieces and texturing in Blender, I dropped it into Unity.

portal unity

This phase included adding the extra decals as well as the particle effects (not shown in the screen) and logic. The portal itself will remain closed until certain procedures are completed.

In Game

Like all the kitparts I make for the game, this will be spawned at runtime for the Procedural Generation. Since this portal is the exit, it will be only spawned once at a random location in the dungeons.

portal ingame

The above screenshot is taken directly from gameplay showing what it looks like once opened.

Xbox Controller Support

I recently took the decision to consider console support and the Xbox was the first to tackle since I had to add controller support for the PC eventually. After some preparation, I decided that the game required a "Hot Swap" design to allow for the game to change the Icons in gameplay in real-time, depending on if a controller is available or not. Doing it this way meant I did not need to branch the code (PC and Xbox) and also meant the player can decide to use Mouse/Keyboard or Pad during the game without the need to return to the Options.

Allowing the player to Hot Swap between controls does have its problems but with the added benefit of not forcing the player to choose in a menu or exit the game was a huge plus for me.

The follow shots show how the Xbox button icons are used in the game currently.

xbox controls03

xbox controls01

xbox controls02

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