Week 1 - Creating the Terrain and Player Movement

I started my game project by creating a new 3D scene in Unity. I added a terrain plane to the scene and used Unity’s terrain brushes to sculpt an Island.

I started with a basic 3D terrain plane object and set its size to 500x500 units. I did not want to create too big of a surface as this would be costly in terms of processing power when adding assets such as trees to the terrain.

I elevated the entire terrain by 15 units so that I could create troughs in the map and use these to define the island’s shores and any lakes. Using Unity’s terrain brush tools, I created a realistic looking terrain with mountain peaks and rocky shores.

I put a great emphasis on designing the terrain to look realistic and fun to play

I added paths within the mountains. This would allow for a heightened experience when the player is searching for animals on the map. They would not know if an enemy was just around the corner.

This is the final map design. The terrain for the island has been created and is defined by the raised areas on the plane. The flat surfaces represent the areas where water will be present.

I added an avatar to the scene which would act as the player’s avatar. This would allow me to attach movement scripts to the object so that the player would be able to traverse the map. As future features such as enemy pathfinding waypoints and interactive aspects are added, it would enable me to test these with the players capsule avatar. I will replace the capsule with a fully animated character after the basic functionality has been implemented.

,I created an avatar controller script which moved the player in the direction of the mouse. Comments in code below: