Devlog 2: May 29 - June 5

This week our team focused on refining and refactoring our mechanics to be more performant and easily extensible.

We found our groove for meeting cadence (twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays), used the Trello board to delegate tasks and manage progress throughout the week, and the sub-teams collaborated on multiple features for this deliverable.

The design team improved the character model by including basic animations for idle, moving, and jumping states. They also worked on designing various interactive objects to make our puzzles more engaging. 

The programming team put in some work refactoring the components from last week. This included implementing Unity's modern input system to encapsulate control bindings, implementing a state plus state machine interface to control the player's active state (moving, aiming a limb, jumping, falling), using this new system to implement new states (roll state when the player has no limbs), and refactoring certain components to listen for events rather than stuffing all the logic into the Update method. 

Overall, we made many quality-of-life improvements to the current level, character, and code to make our lives easier for future deliverables. Our team is excited to use this strong foundation to create interesting levels and make the best puzzle-platformer we can!

What we've achieved so far:

New Input System:

• The player can now be controlled with mouse + keyboard or gamepad bindings
• The camera is controlled by the new input system
• Chose to use the Unity event-based approach, allowing us to create event listener functions instead of using the update method

Player State System:

• A core PlayerStateMachine component stores all relevant state information about the current player state
• The current player state is abstracted away into State classes
• Can easily extend player State by adding a new State file and transitions between states

  
  

  • This was proven by implementing the roll-state
• Implemented Action methods to react to events mentioned above
• Refactored the interactable system to use Actions rather than the Update method
• Transitions between states allow us to smoothly handle animation transitions

Player Model:

• Updated the Player model to include idle, move, and jump animations
• Updated the leg projectile model to match the player design

Our next milestones:

Refine mechanics:

• The limbs feel too light and roll around a lot more than we'd like
• We would like to implement even more puzzle prefabs
• We would also like to discuss introducing secondary mechanics

Squash known bugs:

• Various bugs exist that we need to exterminate
• We need to clean up the repository to remove old scripts, prefabs, and scenes that are no longer in use

UI Design:

• Scope out designing the in-game overlays and menus

Audio Design:

• We still need to agree on an atmosphere for the background music
• We also need to scope out what objects need SFX to improve the look and feel of the game