Update 2 - 5 Hours In

Better Player Controls, Terrain, and Random Son

I wanted to work on the player interactions because I felt like I couldn't really improve my hide-and-seek without being able to look in more than one direction. I really struggled with Quaternions to get the rotations correct.

First Playtest

My 5 year old son wanted to know what I was doing, so I let him play the game. I didn't think it would be useful, but it turned into my first playtest!

Right off the bat, he became frustrated with the controls. He didn't understand why he couldn't turn or that the swiping was relative to the start of the swipe rather than the relative position of the mouse to the character. After I showed it to him, he quickly figured out the controls, but I wonder if I could design them in such a way as to be completely intuitive.

After he played a few times and I told him to go find the blue pill, he gave me my second piece of valuable feedback. "This is boring. Why doesn't he go anywhere else?" I explained that I hadn't put that in yet and that I would have to work on it some more. The hide-and-seek (HaS) aspect was immediately understood by him, enough that he focused on the hider not moving. To allow for replayability, it will be critical for me to get good hide-and-seek mechanics down.

Better Player Controls

I wanted to work on the HaS mechanics but didn't really feel I could tweak them with the character movement gimped as it was. Before, I could only look in the starting direction and the player felt slow. 

I wanted the player to be able to change direction by changing the direction of the swipe without causing the player to continuously turn in a circle. I also wanted the swipe direction to change the players direction based on the forward direction of the player. 

I really struggled with applying my rudimentary knowledge of quaternions to get what I wanted. In the end, I settled on code like this:

If player is swiping...
    if player wasn't swiping before, store the player's rotation Quaternion
    Get direction of swipe
    Calculate the move vector from the direction, speed, time, and adjust by -90 degrees using Quaternion.AngleAxis(-90, Vector3.up)
    Get a look rotation using Quaternion.LookRotation(direction)
    Move the player using transform.Translate(lastRotateQuaternion * moveVector, Space.World)
    Set the player's rotation using Quaternion.RotateTowards(rotation, lastRotateQuaternion * lookRotation, anglePerFrame)

It took me some time, but I think the player controls are much better now.

Terrain

I added rudimentary terrain to the game in order to start playing with it. I think I want to use it for my base, but I wasn't sure because I've never used it before. It did increase my lighting bake time by around 5 minutes, but since unity does that in the background, I'm not too worried about it.

I also made sure to rebake the navigation so we could use it and not clip through.

Random Son

Because the foundation of the game is the HaS mechanic, I added some basic randomness by creating 4 possible spawn points and randomly selecting one for the Son to spawn at. Hopefully, it will keep my 5 y.o son occupied for more than 2 minutes.

Next Steps - AI 

The next thing I want is some basic wander AI for the soldier. Then I can start working on light mechanics.