Hi All!
So i'm starting to learn the basics of Unity with the help of many, many tutorials and was wondering, how are cinematics worked into a game? and how do you create them? If i create a game in Unity, how do i add an opening cutscene or a ending cinematic or so?
And also while we're here, does anybody know how to create a main menu or level select?
These are some of the questions i've had as i've started my Indie Game Dev. adventure, and with real professionals (at least compared to me) answering them i feel much more confident.
Thank you very much,
Chris941!
Creating cutscenes?
It depends what you mean by a cutscene. A cutscene can be any of the following:
- A pre-rendered video, often with better graphics than the game itself.
- A non-interactive sequence achieved with the game engine itself, e.g. you set a series of waypoints for every NPC involved to follow, times when they say their lines, etc.
- An interactive "on rails" sequence, as above but you can control your character within tight limits, e.g. in Batman: Arkham Asylum when they are walking into the prison or Halflife when they are on the monorail.
- A fully interactive sequence which is tightly scripted.
My preference is to use the most interactive method which doesn't allow the player to ruin the point of the cutscene, e.g. kill the person they're meant to talk to. Otherwise their gameplaying is being interrupted by a short movie. A good example is Lost Planet. It felt like about 5 minutes at the start before I could play. Torture!
As far as menus etc, I suggest looking at this:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/GUI%20Scripting%20Guide.html
Unity approaches GUI in a weird way, and not exactly fancy by default. I believe you can get Unity Editor plugins to make some of this easier/nicer.
- A pre-rendered video, often with better graphics than the game itself.
- A non-interactive sequence achieved with the game engine itself, e.g. you set a series of waypoints for every NPC involved to follow, times when they say their lines, etc.
- An interactive "on rails" sequence, as above but you can control your character within tight limits, e.g. in Batman: Arkham Asylum when they are walking into the prison or Halflife when they are on the monorail.
- A fully interactive sequence which is tightly scripted.
My preference is to use the most interactive method which doesn't allow the player to ruin the point of the cutscene, e.g. kill the person they're meant to talk to. Otherwise their gameplaying is being interrupted by a short movie. A good example is Lost Planet. It felt like about 5 minutes at the start before I could play. Torture!
As far as menus etc, I suggest looking at this:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/GUI%20Scripting%20Guide.html
Unity approaches GUI in a weird way, and not exactly fancy by default. I believe you can get Unity Editor plugins to make some of this easier/nicer.
How exactly do you create the short movies or interactive cutscenes?
If it's done using the game engine you typically script it, e.g. describe a path for various involved characters/objects to follow, with their respective actions. Also handle the camera movement the same way. And you let the player play as usual, but you can set limits on what he can do (for instance, in an FPS, the player may not be allowed to shoot during the cutscene, you can make this "feel right" by having the character lower his gun before the cutscene or something). If you mean the pre-rendered videos, probably using very high quality models and textures which the game wouldn't support, assembled and rendered in a specialized offline renderer like LuxRender, etc... and then you get a video back and import it in your game as an asset.
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