CAGD 377 - Slippin Away Sprint #2

  During this sprint, I wanted to tackle various things. Finishing a Puzzle was my main target, and I also wanted to polish some of the work done during the first Sprint. During Sprint Kickoff, the producer and I discussed laying a more stable base for the project. With that said, various other mechanics would be essential to have for the project, so those were the ones I started developing.


First, I wanted to take a very game-essential mechanic: the camera following the player while navigating the level. At first, I started prototyping my own camera, which constantly interpolated the camera position to the player position. However, after doing a bit of research, I came to the conclusion that it would be more efficient to use Unity’s Cinemachine. I’ve never used Cinemachine for a 3D game simulating a 2D game, however, and found a way to freeze the z-axis component on the camera, giving it a smooth follow to the player.



After having the camera following the player as intended, it was time to work on the player respawn mechanic; I had to meet with the game designer to see the type of respawn behavior the player will have with an enemy. Each enemy in the scene will instantly kill the player and restart the level. This was fairly simple to achieve using the previously made custom collision detection system and checking if the collision type is an Enemy. This is how it turned out:



The next two things I had to work on were related to the first Puzzle. First, I needed the camera to detach from following the player and instead focus on the whole puzzle area. The other thing I needed to work on was getting the puzzle area to lock the player inside once the player reached a point inside. First things first was to make a trigger area that will check when the player reaches it and then trigger other events. After the trigger area was done, I worked on a door-closing mechanic that would trigger the door to enter the puzzle. Using linear interpolation, I achieve the door closing. With that, the first puzzle area was completed:



With all those previous steps done, it was finally time to work on the first puzzle. This puzzle involved connecting cables from one color position to the other color position. I had to do research on the line renderer API since I’d never used it before, and I felt it was the best approach for drawing the puzzle cables. So I had to make it so that once the player enters a color, the first end of the cable will be attached to the origin, and then the other end will be in the player’s position. Once the player reaches the other cable target of the same color, the cable end will detach from the player and connect to the target. This is how the mechanic turned out.



Overall, this sprint was very productive, and I managed to get a lot of work done. There were some hurdles during the sprint, but after holding a general meeting outside of class hours, the whole team was able to get back on track and better understand the overall game. The development process during this sprint went smoothly, and I had to put some time into researching things that I hadn’t used before, like the Line Renderer API and Cinemachine for simulating 2D in a 3D environment. There are many ideas that will be implemented next sprint and thanks to my team keeping up with their work we are on track of finishing the game on time.

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