CAGD 377 - Slippin Away Sprint #3

  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. Certainly, I found multiple methods that would be useful, like adding new positions to the renderer. I found an online resource that did exactly what I was looking for; however, after revising the code to understand the logic, I saw that it was very severely implemented and was updating every frame of the line, as well as adding too many “bend positions” when reaching a corner. Although it was not what I was looking for, it was very useful for understanding its logic.


After completing the research, it was time to implement my own, so I started by making a prototype in which one end of the line renderer was stuck to 0,0,0, acting as the origin and another at the position of a game object. After that, it was time to make the bending mechanic, I figured that I needed the cable to bend when reaching a corner, meaning that the beginning and the end do not see each other; after implementing a simple collision, I figured that I was not going to be efficient because of the possible low framerate that a device could have and skip some physics causing inconsistencies in the logic. So, instead, I made a cable collision object that will not only check when the cable is passing through it to bend but also snap the bend to that position.

           

After having the cable bent correctly, I achieved multiple bending very quickly since, with the extra bending position, the cable wouldn’t touch other collisions. So, something else was achieving the cable retracting. I was able to achieve this mechanic by making the almost-to-last point check if it could see the player; if it could, that meant that the last bend position could be removed; if not, that meant the player was not on sight, and the last bending position could keep in place. This is how bending turned out at the end with the mechanics implemented:


Finally, I made the build for the game, added some UI for the game to be played, and adjusted some of the levels so that they worked with all the coding features. The build also had to include the features the designer wanted tested, so that was a meeting that we had, and it turned out great. We had a build released, and the playtest was done.



Overall, this sprint went great and a lot of the core mechanics were done; it was great looking at all our progress coming together and how everything turned out. We had great information come from the playtest that I’m excited to implement in the next sprint. My team did a great job, and we achieved the object proposed at the start, im looking forward to keep developing Slippin Away.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAGD 373 - Pirate Game Assets Final

Image
  Game Walkthrough:      The goal of this project was to recreate a location from Sea Of Thieves. My team decided to work on an outpost with a stationary sloop and a tavern. We needed to make the mountains similar and add many assets that would be interesting for the player to look at, like the barrels and the lamposts. Also, we needed some interactivity, like cannon shooting and quests. My role on this project was the programmer in charge of implementing all the systems regarding the gameplay. So I managed to make the player movement, interaction with barrels, shootable cannons, a quest system, the final battle, money systems, a high score leaderboard table, and many other small systems within the scene. I also tackled Unity-related tasks like generating a new water shader and sculpting the terrain. One of the problems I faced was dealing with the inventory system since that took a whole sprint on its own, and I did not have any prior experience designing one. I tac...
Read more

CAGD 470 - Locked in Sprint #1

Image
  In CAGD 470 (Video Game Production), I was recruited into a group that wanted to make a first-person horror game in which a player is in a laboratory and trying to escape. At the same time, some monsters roam around, making the player’s journey difficult. The game will have various rooms and puzzles that will challenge the player. In the game's vision, enemies would roam the laboratory. The player would have to gather various items that will help them on their journey to escape the lab. After getting an idea of the game, many key points and features came to my attention, including the player controller, enemy AI, Inventory System, and Crafting System. All those were going to be heavy tasks for this project. After discussing with the other members in the group, we concluded that the hardest feature to develop would be enemy AI since it needed to include multiple behaviors and enemy types, and we all had previous experience programming enemy AI. I took on the task of learning how t...
Read more

CAGD 495 - Stumble Sprint #3

Image
  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...
Read more