09-25-2024

Update Overview

This week, we aimed to refine the core mechanics in our game, and prototyped a ton of art assets. 

Progress

Mechanics

We made several changes to our pogo stick movement.

Jumping

• The player now pauses for a brief moment when they touch the ground, while the spring of the pogo stick compresses. This gives the player more time to choose where they will jump.
• Added placeholder squash and stretch animations to communicate when the player is about to jump.
  
• The player can now hold jump to compress the spring further, and jump higher

Steering

• Added the ability to rotate side-to-side, to emulate strafing in other 3d platformers. We clamp the strafe angle to 15 degrees, and also reset the position when there is no horizontal input, to make it easier to manage two axis of rotation.
  
• When performing front flips or backflips, the player's rotation speed increases when they are upside down. This makes it easier to complete the full flip without the player landing on their head.
• The pivot point for player has been moved to the foot of the pogo stick. We found that this lines up with how we expect a pogo stick to function on the ground. However, when in the air, we change the pivot point to the player's center gravity. This feels for realistic, and makes doing flips easier. 

Camera

• We added some subtle smoothing to the camera tracking, as we found the constant jumping could get nauseating. Some further adjustments may be needed. 

Spells

• We've updated our spell system to support more spells. The player can now perform 1 of 2 different (place holder) animations, coupled with either a front flip or a backflip to cast 1 of 4 different spells, that are activated when they land.  (Water, Earth, Fire, Air)
• We implemented place holder particle effects for these 4 spells
• Prototyped a functioning Ice spell: The player can freeze bodies of water to be able to jump of of them

Assets

Our art team prototyped several assets that we used to create a demo level. These included

• Block outs of floating island platforms
• Pillars (Will be part of larger ancient ruins)
• 3 different types of trees
• Bomb flowers (will be detonated by our fire spell as part of platforming puzzles)

Challenges

• With the new movement system, it is possible to get stuck on corners and walls, if hit at the wrong angle. We plan to adjust our colliders and ray casts to be more consistent, and use the pogo stick and surface normals to consider when a jump is valid.
• We find it difficult to make precise jumps with our current system. We are considering adding some kind of arc tracing to show the trajectory of the jump
• Integration: We included some local changes to complete our tech demo that have yet to be merged. It is also challenging to efficiently divide work into tasks that can be parallelized, so that everyone can work on something. For instance, level design is dependent on the completion of movement and art assets.
• Some import issues with art assets into Unity: Scales can be off, and normals are sometimes inverted.
• Keeping code modular and separated: Our spell system and movement are currently coupled together.

Next Steps

• Player modelling, rigging and animation
• Implementation of our remaining 3 spells
• Separation of movement from spells (Code clean up)
• Refining movement
• UI/Menus
• Death/Checkpoint system: We currently manually reset our player position when they fall off the map.

See you next week!