CAGD 377 - Slippin Away Sprint #1

 In CAGD 377 (Mobile Game Development), we were tasked with researching and pitching multiple mobile games from the most popular genres. I joined a group that was going to develop Slippin Away. This game was about a slime trying to escape the sewers by solving puzzles, jumping, and sticking to the walls. I was tasked to be the programmer for this game, and so after getting the general vision for the game, I wanted to develop some basic mechanics like launching and sticking to the walls.


I started creating GitHub and giving every team member access to it. After getting everyone’s contact information, I added a new Unity project to GitHub and started prototyping the necessary things for the slime.



 

I began prototyping the launching system, which would be one of the hardest things to do. After talking to the designer, we ended up with a version of the launch, which is like the player will drag from the slime’s origin, take the direction, invert it, and make it relative to the player’s position.




After testing the math, I created an inverted direction for the mouse position, which launches the player depending on the distance of the direction the player dragged. After having this mechanic implemented and working, I researched ways that the enemy could stick to the walls. The simple answer for the prototype was enabling the kinematic value in the rigid body, which made the player freeze in the short term. One of the problems I faced with this is that when the player is launched in the frame that is launched, it will take the collision and, therefore, freeze the player in its exact position. A quick fix to this was adding a small delay to check the collision once the player is launched. 



During this time, we had our first playtest, during which we had insight from the playtesters about our core mechanics working and being “fun.” We discovered that the player would keep playing the game even after the time ran out. Hearing this, we figured that having the time limit at the end of the level would not work, so we decided to let the players keep playing and give them some kind of star system to enable level replayability and encourage them to beat their own time.


After doing some further testing with the collisions on the project, I saw that the player was stopping before touching the wall. So I started researching a ray cast system that would shoot a ray in as many directions as the designer wanted and use those ray casts to check how far the player was from the wall. Now, this prototype was not as exact or was not a complete fix to the On Collision Enter; however, it was somewhat more accurate and definitely something to look more into in the future.



One of the last things I did was research a trajectory viewer. This viewer is meant to show the player in which direction the slime will go, taking into account the current touch position. Unfortunately, after prototyping, I was not able to get this feature working before the end of the sprint, so I will work on it in the next sprint.


Overall, during this sprint, I took a lot of time researching the game mechanics the games would need and, moreover, the math for these mechanics. My group also took the time during this sprint to get everyone on the same page. That way, we could have a more accurate vision of what the game would look like and the scope in mind of how many features we want to implement for the final game build.




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