The Chronicles of Evenhelm
The Wastes
Your character, who will be replaced by one of the True Imperial Heirs, stands in front of his home town of Oasis, nestled within the inhospitable desert Wastes. Controls are basic first person controls, for the time being, although Isometric 3D Person controls are planned. The waters of Lake Arid would work, but time did not permit writing a script which allows surface skimming and diving controls in water, so the character simply falls through the water's surface into a water body box that does nothing at all. All of the pieces actually exist, including the part that turns underwater environments blue, but the SwimmableMotor script, which is still forth coming.
On the bright side, the game contains five models that I generated, three of which are the different building types. The basic house has approximately fourty-one faces, while the Blacksmith's shop has the addition of a chimley, up from which billows the smoke of his labors. The estate of the provential govenor is actually the basic house with a decorative dome placed on top, which was far too much work to generate. The other two models are signs, one of which greets the player upon entering Oasis Township, while the second resides outside the Blacksmith's humble shop. All of these models were generated using Google SketchUp8.
A package of humongous sandstones were chosen from Google's 3D warehouse. Each was modeled from real sandstones found in the world, and have more than five hundred faces. These seven rocks were scattered throughout the desert wastes, good luck finding all of them, because the place is quite large. Google Warehouse did not indicate the license for these sandstones specifically, but I believe that all Google Warehouse models are licensed under Creative Commons. A fun fact about the stones is that they were generated from real sandstones using some technical wizardry, and are actually intended for use creating early Midevial style buildings from unmasoned stones. While I have not tried to do so, it is said that the stones fit together so that you could concievably build things with them, given a little mortar and an endless supply of expendable labor.
A heightmap was generated detailing the basic terrain layout using a program called L3DT from a tiny two person Melborn based development team called Bundysoft. They did a great job on creating a versitle but easy to use heightmap generator, and so I thought I'd plug their little mission. Terragen classice was used to generate the skybox at pain staking detail, but otherwise, the map was made within Unity3D using the Terrain brushes and a package called Terrain Assets, which supplied numerous grasses, trees, shurbs, and other peices of terrain doodaddery.
One final detail exists before I link you to the web page. You can walk out of the world by walking to where the exiting road is cleaved into the side of the platue on the east side of the map. It's the direction your character faces when you start. I'd prefer that you not do this, as this would be the exit into the next area in a working video game, and I spent a lot of time on the game just to have you go find the easiet bug in the whole peice of software...
Please enjoy the almighty WebPlayer!.
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