WCCChallenge 2025 Week 16 - Filter

Final Live Code

Summary

WCCChallenge Blurb

Biz	Biz Biz
Author	Project Somedays
Title	WCCChallenge 2025 Week 16 - Filter
📅 Started	2025-04-19
📅 Completed	2025-04-20
🕒 Taken	~10hrs 😅 and it’s REALLY not quite finished but I’ve well run out of time
🤯 Concept	Quick! Abduct the stretch sheep Alpacas!
🔎 Focus	Working with InstanceMeshes to take full advantage of Three.js’ WEBGL Performance
🖥️Rig Deets	24GB RAM, 13th Gen Core i9, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

Made for Sableraph’s weekly creative coding challenges, reviewed weekly on https://www.twitch.tv/sableraph

See other submissions here: https://openprocessing.org/curation/78544

Join The Birb’s Nest Discord community! https://discord.gg/g5J6Ajx9Am

Bit off more than I could chew with some very unfamiliar ground to cover but learned a LOT.

Gemini was my tutor - I asked it lots of questions rather than relying on it to write my code - only half the time the tutor was getting it wrong…

So, pretty much like a REAL tutor 🤣

🎓Lessons Learned🎓

• When you’ve baked the texture in blender, you need to make sure each material channel has an image texture node referencing the texture you’re baking to
• Make sure your uv unwrap has a bit of an island offset
• How to add audio! Not too bad. Lots of boilerplate, but pretty straightforward. According to Gemini you can add positional sound in your scene. Three.js is NUTS.

Resources:

• Low Poly Sheep by mohnely on BlenderKit
• UFO Model
• Sheep by PapercutterJohn (Freesound) on Pixabay
• abduction bass by phoenelai (Freesound) on Pixabay
• Spaceship Ambient by BatuhanYldz (Freesound) on Pixabay
• Abduction Single Bass by phoenelai (Freesound) on Pixabay

Stretch Goals/Extension Ideas

• Tilt the saucer when moving in any given direction
• Make the controls MUCH smoother… basic physics probably so it’s a bit tricky with overshooting
• Make a safe zone to mark when alpacas have craftily escaped…
• Different levels with faster sheep/alpacas

TODO:

Models

• Set up a template
• Find a sheep model
• Adapt for alpaca
• Bring into three.js
• Get a walk cycle sorted
• Import UFO
• Make it spin
• Bake the UFO texture

Code Structure/Biz

• Refactor so we can work with TWO instancedMeshes
• Work with Promises because loading

Controls

• UFO Controls with arrow keys
• Smooth out motion
• Move the camera to a starting position off to the side at the right height to see the saucer

Gameplay

• Work out abduction reset
• Choose initial animals in positions by Math.random() < alpacaRatio
• Update biz
• Scoring
• Display scoring?
• Set up an end zone?

Audio

• Add ambient sheep audio
• Add abduction sound
• Add ambient spaceship sound

🪵Dev Log🪵

2025-04-19 Most of the build… (or so I thought)

• Alpacas are just stretch sheep, right?

• Baking textures. Took a little bit to get my head around, but now it’s so handy…

• InstancedMesh for the win

• Changed the starting perspective and checked the alpacas… Hooray!

2025-04-20 Refactoring and finishing

• Quite a bit of refactoring to work with TWO instancedmeshes
• Refactoring for promises
• Worked out how to distribute the alpacas among the sheep
• Worked out how to import the textures with the refactored code
• Added a html element to track scoring
• Added REALLY rudimentary scoring mechanic