Martin Vilches

  During this Sprint Kickoff, my most significant task was creating the watcher enemy. Also, during kickoff, my team started discussing what would be needed for the game to be fully functional with the sprints we had left. It looked like the watcher would be one of our last enemies added, so most of the time in this sprint was dedicated to the watcher itself. Sprint Kick-off was good because I got to discuss the game’s current state and the work ahead for future sprints with the producer, designer, and another programmer. I started researching the watcher and how it had to achieve the intended behavior. So, the watcher enemy is supposed to follow you when you look at it and stop when you look at it. So I started looking at how to check if the camera was seeing an object, and luckily, various forums mentioned different ways of checking if the camera was looking at a game object. One of the bigger problems I ran into when developing this feature was that the object was being checked ...

  For the Sprint, there were various things that I wanted to tackle, mostly fixing bugs and adding some basic animations. During Sprint Kickoff, I was tasked with polishing some of the previously implemented mechanics. My first approach to handling the problem was to set a priority for every bug and start working from there. After having the feedback from our playtesters, I had a general idea of how to fix some of the core bugs.  First off, It was polishing the character controller so that the player wouldn’t get stuck as easily; previously, if the player were in a corner, they would get soft-blocked. After looking at the code, it was a problem in the main logic of the character controller, so I had to change various aspects of the character controller; first, I had to make it so that the controller is stuck and independent and not depending on the box collider attached. Using my previously implemented custom collision detection system, I could check when the player hit a corn...

During Sprint 4 of Stumblebumps, I wanted to accomplish various tasks, including fixing some of the bugs found in previous sprints and reworking some backend systems. During Sprint Kickoff, I was assigned to work on more systems and fix bugs. One of the main concerns or focus for this sprint was making better developer tools that the designer and the level designers needed to test the levels more efficiently. Right after the Sprint kickoff, I first tackled Player Animations. Since both of our animators were being shared among all the teams, I knew the earlier we had that animation feedback, the better for them. This was my first big approach to handling character animations in Unity, and I wanted to make them look good so they fit our character controller and display the animations themselves. Because I wanted the animation handling to be outside of the main third-person movement, I had to implement a wrapper that would extract some values from the main third-person controller and send...

  During the Sprint kickoff for Locked In, we had a very straightforward object: to get a build of the game done and have a playtest released. To achieve this there were various key aspects of the game that we had to work on. My job was getting more enemies done and released. We would need to implement other things, like health and other enemy features.  So, starting with the features, the first thing that I tackled was making the health component, which needed to be the most modular it could be; I wanted the same Health component to be used by the enemies and the player, which meant a lot of adjusting. Something else that I was aware of is that the player can grab an extra armor piece that acts as a shield, so I made it so the health component could also have a shield. Finally, I added some events that trigger when the health is changed and when the health is depleted; that way, there could be a modular way for the other programmer to implement it and apply it to their play...

  During the Sprint kickoff, we discussed various objectives for this sprint. The first thing we wanted was to implement the feedback we received. Another thing that was going to be needed for this sprint was getting a build of the game released to the Play Store. So, at first, our focus was on doing multiple puzzles that the player could complete; however, after discussing it, we decided it would be better to focus on a single puzzle and leave the other mechanics to want instead of a need. Now, the puzzle that we wanted to put our focus on was the cable connecting puzzle. We wanted to expand this puzzle by making it so you can bend around the corners, bend multiple times, retract when needed, and have some kind of collision detection for them. So, I started developing the cables, and the first thing I did was research what was going to be needed to achieve this bending mechanic. We are using Unity’s line renderer component, so I figured looking through its API would be the best....

  Starting Sprint #3 for Stumble, there were various things that I wanted to get done; personally, I wanted to implement the core game loop and get started on the arena for the game. During the sprint kickoff, there were various priorities that the designer and producer wanted me to get done at the beginning of the sprint, which were modifying the player controller further and changing some keys; these changes were based on the playtests conducted at the end of the previous sprint. It was mentioned to me that during this sprint, we were going to have an animator & rigger for the team, so I wanted to get animations in the game. So, the first thing I started working on was the priorities and adjusting the player controller. I started working on a delay for the diving mechanic. The biggest problem during the playtest was that players were unable to cancel the dive and dive midair again; if you were quick enough, you would get boosted forward just by tapping space quickly. I adde...