Today, I decided to unshelve a project which I’d put on the backburner since July. The project is a Pikmin-like puzzlely platformer in the Unity engine with the central gameplay revolving around controlling a swarm of minions (with the working title Minionoids!). I’ve always enjoyed the Pikmin games and felt like there’s not been much like it available for PC, so it seemed like a fun project to work on in my spare time. 🙂
I have however tried to spice the idea up a bit by creating a first person version. The player grabs the minions with a tractor beam which is fired from their gun, and allows them to fire the minions out of a gun to attach to things. In this case the minions would be ice-elemental minions which can create frozen platforms when shot into water, allowing other elements of minions to cross when they’d otherwise be stuck…
Each frozen platform has a NavMeshSurface on them and NavMeshLinks are generated dynamically when a new platform is spawned. This takes into account a jump radius for the agent and links the platforms together if they’re within this radius. The other minions can then use these links in the nav mesh to jump across!
It obviously needs polishing up. I’m wanting to add some jumping between the platforms, and I need to work out how to retrieve the minions shot into the water…but I’m pretty happy with the progress so far! 🙂
Jonathan Mulligan 