By Ben Purdy
In Kick Some Bass, when the player is not fishing or fighting, they will be exploring the Island on which the game takes place via the Interactive Map. In this blog post, I will go over the Interactive Map(IM for short) and explain its purpose and why we chose to go with one.
The Map as a Whole
Every good game needs a setting, right? Hyrule, Lordran, Dust2, all good settings and our game is no different. Now, like all people, we had plenty of ambition for the map. We were planning on having multiple different biomes that the map would be divided into, but with our limited development time, we are limiting the scope to one biome, the starting area where the protagonist Jim Jimson lives.
Why a Map Anyway?
You might be wondering, why use a map in the first place, why not just use a basic level selector? While it would be much easier to have a simple 2D map, the team thought that it wouldn’t serve the type of game we are aiming for. Having a 3D map that the player can freely move around in serves multiple purposes.
The primary reason is that it just felt right to have a map that you could walk around in, without one it would be fairly bland in between fish fights. Having the player be able to explore the map also allows for more interactivity outside of the fishing and fighting, with things such as signs and minigames scattered around to give the player some more things to do if they want a brief break from the standard gameplay loop.
How Does the Map Work?
The map is a dedicated scene in unity that the player will load into by default. Currently, it is just a way to get to the fishing and fighting with only the starting fishing area. To enter into the fishing areas, a basic script is attached to a game object. The script detects if the player is close enough and if they press E, and fulfilling both of these criteria will send the player to the fishing area. There are also simple interactable objects like signs that will simply display a text message above it if the player gets close enough.
So that’s the map! Currently, the map is still in development but should be coming along swimmingly (haha). Make sure to check back on here to see more of what we have coming up!