We have cool things! Now I am less embarassed about my screenshots. The tictacs are long gone, but heroes were battling in an arena of sad prototypage! But no more!

In between a busy time moving house, enough was enough, and I made things (un)prettier. This involved a 3 4 step plan. In the process I’ve learned some nice 3D abilities to bodge into the future hopefully. 🙂

Phase 1: Buy an arena!

This arena to be precise. It’s a boxing arena, but after much consulting with backstage brawls and arena tours on YouTube, it has everything I need. The ring was fantastically detailed, but alas, a boxing ring. I may get brave and try to morph it, but I fear it all so very much. Still, this is a fantastic asset to have. It’s infinitely better than the infinite hours it would take me to create! 🙂

Phase 2: Edit said arena!

The next thing I did, (after an hour of watching my characters walk around) was to message the creators of this arena (StudioLab) and ask them very nicely if I can edit their work. This is important to do, and also very polite. They agreed to this, so off I went on a magical Blender journey. I added some of the concourse behind the stands, a back wall. These are things that most games keep hidden away for strange reasons like “the user never sees this” and “optimisation.”

Pleased, I then went back into Unity and watched my characters walk around some more. I even popped in a quick test entrance ramp! This then led to me opening up Blender…

Phase 3: Appear “live” … via “satellite” to no audience!

Since starting, I thought it would be neat to have render textures on big screens. I also had the idea of making the arena modular. Hopefully players can chop and choose with set dressing, and ideally it’ll make mod support easy.

The only real hurdle I faced was getting the render textures to play nicely with my screens. UV editor in ProBuilder came in useful, as adjusting the tiling worked great. The screens and such are caught from the traditional hard-camera position; I enjoyed how it looked. I will likely do something more creative with them in time. I made a branch on my source-control to brainstorm for it all; videos, text, backstage segments, all within reach! 🙂

For now though, this screenshot makes me happy. Note how the screens shows a character on it.

Phase 4: Fix phase 2!

The diplomatic way of saying this is that I am a “learner” in how I use 3D modelling software. I had puzzles on the way, such as “why is half the wall dark for no reason?” and “why is the floor ultra stretched?” These questions took me on a few evenings learning how to re-do the backstage area, and do it properly.

Next Time!

I plan to really get the AI logic set up, I did some important fixes this month, so that the sequence in matches is better. For example, the game now waits for wrestlers to get behind the curtain before kicking off the entrances for the next match. It’s introduced a few gaps in the logic, so I need to smooth things over, possible rewrite some of the code, but thanks to the early groundwork, it’s nicer to edit. I need to keep things tidy as I do this; nothing is worse than returning to messy and daft code to unpick why things aren’t working.

Thank you for reading this, and please do check out the forums to ask anything, or chat wrestling! 🙂