Fourth week of development!

Last week was an exciting week for me and the group in general! We have a game now, kind of. Our alpha is feature complete and we are ready this week for a feature freeze.

A lot of work went in to squash out the bugs in the movement system this week, and making sure it works for all cases. I devoted the first 2-3 days of last week to this. Also, we added items! Three items are in the game. A grappling hook which lets you scale any wall you want, a shuriken which knocks out the guard and a smokebomb which hides you from vision.One of our artists threw together a  fast level and putting everything together yielded a pretty good alpha build. As we sent it off for testing we got a good amount of feedback, some positive, some negative, all useful. 🙂

My work consisted of the general producing stuff: setting up scrum, bridging communications, helping when people have questions etc etc… But i also did some bug fixing and added in the shuriken item. We had several weird bugs with guard behavior such as their tendency to move to the  top left square before starting and patrol path,  skipping over tiles to get to a position they REALLY wanted to go and other problems.

 

The shuriken was pretty easy to create. If you click on the shuriken and then click on the enemy, the enemy sends itself off to the player which checks if he is in range and then throws the shuriken at him. The whole game is essentially on pause until all this is done. I used something called animation events for the correct timing: This allows you to call a certain function at a certain time in a animation. The biggest obstacle was trying to make the distance checking work. Since we are using a grid based system, we made a commitment to use grid based rules rather using raycasts which could result in weird results on diagonals and since our objects don’t actually contain colliders. Instead i check each neighbor of a tile in a straight line until we find a target we clicked on. Off course, any tile marked “impassible” will not be checked. If we don’t find the enemy the player clicked on, it is an invalid target!

 

I am so glad we have something that looks very much like a game! Hopefully by next post we will have the last few items, and maybe few new models to show off.