CAGD 470 - LockedIn Sprint #5

 During Sprint Kick, we found some exciting things we wanted to research. Since I’ve been in charge of the enemies since the beginning of the project, it was my job to do this research. The designer aimed to research a mimic behavior, which meant I had to do research into procedural generation. With that plan in place, the other things that we needed to get done were polishing some mechanics further and adding details to the game.


I started by researching some procedural animation examples in Unity and how they are handled. After looking at some of those examples, I had a basic knowledge of procedural animation. So, after understanding the basics, I started looking at tutorials on how this is approached in Unity from a development side; what we were looking to make was some kind of alien octopus that would walk on any surface that would be in front of it. However, because of the time left for the project, I soon informed the designer and producer of some of my concerns when developing this animation. They acknowledged this and decided to shift the rest of the sprint to another, so we scraped this idea and started with other game features. 


The next thing on the working list was adding a new feature to the watcher: rage mode. This feature consisted of the player looking at the watcher directly in the eyes, the watcher entering into this new state called the rage state, which will increase its speed and charge at the player even if it's looking at it. This state had its challenges, which were making the rage override the other states, and also, I had to make a separate component that would be attached to the player, which would also check when the player is looking directly at the watcher in the eyes. With this, the watcher logic was working great.



After that, I added a minor fix to the watcher: instead of processing where the player was from the center of the game to the eye level, we would have more consistency with the watcher.


With that, I started working on the last thing for this sprint, which was implementing a final version for the watcher, which meant implementing the model for the watcher. So, I started by going to the designer's reference and decided to find a rigged humanoid model. So, after looking around, I found that Mixamo had a rigged mannequin model, which worked perfectly for this watcher. I also took the chance to pick some walking animations that would fit the watcher's feeling.


With those assets in place and looking at the designer reference, I started modifying the watcher so that it fitted our model. I made the watcher dark like a shadow so he can look mysterious and can not easily be seen in a dark environment; what is characteristic about the watcher is the red eyes; So because the model did not have eyes, I added to spheres with an red emission which made it look like the watcher had red eyes.



With the model fixed, I started working on connecting the animations, so I made a quick animator component and added the walking animations and a boolean parameter to control it through code. Finally, it was time to make an addon for the watcher that would subscribe to the watcher switching state and switch the animation based on that.


Overall, this sprint was less effective than I would have hoped for; taking the time to research the procedural animations was good since we were able to have a scope approach to it, which was good for the overall project. My team has been keeping up with their work, and Locked in looks good to release on the assigned date. In the next sprints, I will be able to improve my performance.

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