CAGD 370 Blog Post 2

 The Crescendo

Sprint 2

    For this sprint, my team and I started developing our game within Unity. To me, this is our most important sprint, and the work done on this Kinesthetic prototype will define how the future of our game plays and feels. Implementing a reactive and fun movement system that flow with our level design is my core goal during this sprint.

    Getting our core movement system working as intended took longer than I anticipated. I ran into a large issue when trying to get our movement system working with Unity's new input system. Our game was not reading the first input by the player, so I spent time working with a programming instructor during office hours. I was finally able to solve this issue after spending some time with Unity's scripting manual, allowing me to begin working on how our player would react to the surrounding level.

    

    Among my responsibilites in implementing our core movement, I was also in charge of creating the systems in which our player would react to collisions. I worked into our movement speed an acceleration modifier that would help our players increase in speed as they performed better, making the gameplay more engaging. By reacting to collisions, we are able to visually show that you hit an obstacle by decelerating the player drastically, before speeding them back up.

    One of my personal goals was to make my scripts more accessible to my level designer and Lead this sprint. I spent additional time commenting in my code, as well as making variable more available for instant tweaking when working in Unity Editor. This was to streamline production and allow for those not as comfortable with editing code to easily change things as they go along.

    Between working on my own assigned tasks, I helped my Lead by writing a quick script that was set up in psuedo-code by him. I connected our movement with the pitch in our Audio Source Game Component, and then set him loose on working on finding the values that best fit our scene.

    I spent a lot of time working on making sure that our movement and level would work together. Since the level was made before there was full implementation of acceleration and collisions, I needed to find what was not working. By spending this additional time playing through our level and tweaking our movement scripts, I was able to provide feedback on our level to both the Lead and the level designer in my team. This helped us further discuss the vision of this project.

    Another task that I completed for this sprint was setting up our player boundaries. As our player has set positions that they may shift to at this time, I needed a way to keep track of where the players was on the staff lines within our game at all times. This allowed me to keep the player within the staff lines of the level and to make them progress through as intended.