Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

The Unity Asset Store is a great place to buy digital content – not just for Unity but for programming and games development in general. It just so happens that I decided to use Unity to do my games dev after all.

It has a fantastic cross-platform compiler – meaning one code base can be used to create apps for both iOS and Android (as well as Windows, Linux, Mac, even XBox and Playstation!) and it also gives you access to loads of ready-to-use content (such as 3d models, camera shaders, interface designs etc).

I’ve used Unity for a few non-game projects, almost always as a way of providing a smartphone interface to custom-made electronics hardware, via the excellent Bluetooth LE library (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/network/bluetooth-le-for-ios-tvos-and-android-26661)

Normally I use Unity only for “flat screen” interfaces, so it’s been quite a challenge learning how to use it’s 3D games engine (and then learn how to ignore 95% of it, and write my own code to control the on-screen characters in response to commands from the hardware).

The Asset Store is a great place to find rigged and even animated characters for your Unity games, but, unsurprisingly, there aren’t any GW Genestealers readily available. I guess this is mostly an IP/copyright issue, so I did think about having a go at creating a Genestealer model and rigging it.

After a couple of wasted evenings I decided that

• a) my 3D modelling sucks
• b) animating is really, really hard

so I deciding to use a pre-existing character, even if it’s not a 100% match. The closest thing I could find was the “ghoul zombie” (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/ghoul-zombie-14477)

I particularly like the “climbing out of a tomb” animation- when set in a sci-fi/spaceship setting, this could look really cool, as the creature climbs onto the space deck from a hole in the floor.

But it’s not quite “Genestealer enough” for me.

The model and the animations, I’ll have to live with. Luckily, assets from the Unity Asset Store come with all the materials and textures that make up the creature, which are easily editable in GIMP or Paint Shop Pro/Photoshop. A few minutes with the clone brush and a bit of colour shifting and I think I’ve got my “genestealer-ish” character for the tablet/digital version of the game….

(footnote: the characters are deliberately “low-poly”, not just because of cost – everything in the asset store has a price tag! – but to ensure that the game will run across the widest range of devices. Once I’ve created one set of working hardware, I need to create another, to enable across-the-internet play – and I’ve no idea how old/modern the device my opponent will be using is. By sticking just to low-poly models, that run on even old iOS/Android devices, the greater the chance of it “just working” without requiring a super-fancy graphics card or the lastest CPU/GPU combination).