Blog Post 5

 

CAGD 470 - Video Game Production

Rune Chronicles

Blog Post 5

    Welcome back to another Sprint update for Rune Chronicles. Today I will be summarizing the work done during our 5th Sprint. Our team, The Chronicler's, completed 28 points this sprint between programming, modeling, and building out our levels. My tasks consisted of fixing our merge issues within GitHub after a bad merge from a team-member to our development branch and creating new enemy classes for our larger enemy types: The Big Chonk and Chungus. My other tasks consisted of creating a new feedback form for a new digital playtest build, enemy collision fixes, player projectile collision fixes, as well as placing enemies throughout the playtest scene.

    My top priority at the beginning of this sprint was fixing our merge issues with our development branch. We recently had a fix implemented, but had a member not understand good Git practice which resulted in work being lost across different branches and caused sync issues between machines. To resolve this, I had the branch rolled back and had a Unity package sent over to me in order to import the new assets and modified scene into my branch, before merging it up after resolving any discrepancies. We also ran into this issue again later in the sprint, but thankfully our other programmer was able to follow similar steps to resolve the issue.

    After we had made sure that work was able to be completed again, I followed up by creating 2 new enemy classes containing much more health than our previous enemy class, though they move considerable slower. I was able to complete this task quickly due to the modularity of our enemy scriptable objects. It is set up for our designers to modify different aspects of an enemy without needing to expose the code of many variables at all. I started off by creating a single new class, but the speed of creation gave me enough time to complete both tasks back-to-back.

    Once I had completed the enemy classes, I had a couple days that work was not completed by me as I prepared for an interview and spent additional time away from my classes in order to secure the new position (Which I did!). While this additional time away from this project was beneficial for my work, I found it made it more difficult to jump back to work on Rune Chronicles because I still had a lot of work to complete in much less time now.

    I was made aware by our level designers that they would like the crystal count statistic in-game to be dynamic and change the win condition based on how many they placed in the scene so that they could have more agency is placing the crystals. To accomplish this, I modified our end-rune crystal script to check our player crystal count against a new variable that was decided at run-time, our max crystal count within the level. Alongside this change was another modification to our end-runes, a very short time that would allow the player to stand on the runes for a short time before being whisked away from the level.

    Near the end of the sprint, I began working on the collision issues that our players and designers were experiencing while moving across terrain. Enemies were having difficulty damaging the player when they collided, which was incredibly unreliable as an enemy to the player. This issue was exacerbated by the players projectile collision box, which was acting just as unreliable, which made finding the exact issue more difficult. The problem with the enemy collision had to do with box colliders being inside of other colliders on our enemy, which ended up being a different issue than the projectile problem. The solution to fixing our projectile was modifying the way that our projectile was being moved by the script, as well as changing which child object held our desired collider. As the projectile was spinning, the box collider remained rigid and pointing up, causing it to only align with the projectile once every complete circle.

    Finally, I conducted our final review and polish of our second digital prototype. This involved modifying slight placements throughout the scene and populating the level with both our old enemy type and the new enemy types in order to properly engage the player and present a challenge to them as they progressed.

    That is the work that I was able to complete during this sprint. I am happy with the amount that I completed overall, though I feel that I did lose time in the middle of it that I would have otherwise liked to have had. I will see you at the end of sprint 6! I look forward to presenting even more of our game and the progress being made on Rune Chronicles.