Timeline is a powerful tool for creating cutscenes and short movies. But there’s more to it! Let’s see how we can leverage Timeline to blend gameplay and storytelling, bringing our game to the next level. With the release of 2017.1, Unity added a new and powerful tool to its arsenal: Timeline. You have probably seen at this point how creators have leveraged Timeline to create incredible short movies, like Neil Blomkamp’s Adam Episode 2 and 3 or Unity’s own Book of the Dead, or to add storytelling to their games. This all sounds very exciting, but as a game developer, the question that I asked myself when I saw Timeline was: is it really just a linear sequencing tool? Can I only create cutscenes with it? Interrupt the gameplay, play a non-interactive sequence that advances the story, and resume gameplay? With this question in mind, I created a small demo to use Timeline in a creative way. I made a little Real-Time Strategy game, in which I used some custom Timeline tracks to achieve a couple of interesting effects. And I found the answer to my question (spoiler): with a little bit of scripting, Timeline can do so much more. Assets alert! If you want to look into the demo that I created while you read, it can be downloaded here. I called it “A Terrible Kingdom” since it uses the graphic assets of “A Mighty Kingdom”, the demo used in the keynote for Vision Summit 2017. But I remixed… [Read full story]
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