Nuclear Fiesta

NOTE: This game was originally created for a gamejam but I've done a lot of additional work on it since then, including a phone port, the original version is still available for download (nuclearFiestaGamejam)

GAWC #6: Impending bombardment

My idea:

At first I associated the idea of bombardment with nuclear bombs, something that takes your guts and scares all the more so as it could really happen, plus it's been a long time since I wanted to make a game with a map of the world, so I combined the two to have the concept, a WW3.

What went well during the Challenge:

To make the curve between the player and its destination I needed a curve equation, and a Bézier curve was fine. I just copied the equation on a website and it worked the first time, so much the better if not to do math like that I would never have had the time. The data table to fill in the characteristics of each country also saved me so much time, instead of having a ChildActor for each country.

What went wrong during the Challenge:

I will have to do a little more than 4 lines because there was a lot of things going wrong.

To manage the collision with the base countries I wanted to overlay the images of each country, and with a line trace get the UVs of the surface, then render it on a render target to take the color of the pixel, and if the opacity is of 1 then we are on solid ground, but this method is absolutely not optimized and causes lags even at low frequencies, instead I created an svg which I then extruded and decimate in blender to redo the shape of the country in 3d, I had to do this for 16 countries, it took almost an entire afternoon and wasted a lot of time. The "PerInstanceRandom" node didn't work either (even in instanced static mesh). The player's navigation system was broken half of the time.

What I learned during this Challenge:

I like how Materials offer infinite possibilities combined with math, I learned about the "GeneratedBand" node which I used for the nuclear alert, I also got a little better at drawing on krita ( I did the humans, the world map, the bombers and the missiles). This is the second GameJam I've done (the last one lasted a month), and in the end I'm pretty proud of this game.