Technical Accomplishments

(major changes) RigidBody based movement for the player as a whole

💡 Now both 3D and 2D movement work based on RigidBody velocities.

• This has allowed for:
  • Better collisions (no more jittering) with other objects and shadows (so in both 3D and 2D).
  • Better movement control (velocity isn’t instantaneous but it is crisp).
  • Better movement through slopes (avoiding buggy collision behaviour we previously had).
  • Jumping is now more realistic in 2D, based on the normal of the platform the player is standing on.

(major changes) Player Entity

💡 Instead of behaving as two entities that each have their own set of scripts, we have merged the 3D and 2D players into 1 game object. Meaning that as the player moves through the map, both its 3D and 2D forms move as one, only changing its abilities based on the state it is in.

• This in turn resulted in the much needed revamp of a lot of our player related scripts (a lot of refactoring and modularization), as now the behaviours for the 2 player states are managed within each of these scripts.

New Features

(new!) Cinemachine Camera Management!

 💡 Our camera system is now controlled by Cinemachine, allowing for smooth camera work as the player moves throughout our levels.

(new!) First Playable Level!

💡 Our first playable level has now been released, meaning we can send off our corner level test suite 🥳.

Other Miscellaneous Changes

• (new!) 360 Cornering System now supports outside corners. So beyond our past prefab update which allowed for 90-degree cornering, now 270-degree cornering is allowed:

• When a player grabs an object in 3D mode, all other objects in the screen get frozen, allowing the player to better place this object around without messing up the positioning of other objects.

Next Steps

• Smooth out corner switching (allow players to carry their velocity through them).
• Keep incorporating new assets created by the arts and music teams into our level design.
• Remain steady on level design progress.
• Create main menu and other UI functionalities for the first alpha.
• Further polishing and bug-fixing with the new level designs.
• Start off the development of the secondary mechanics (collectible system and interactive object system)

Important Discoveries

• Our major technical changes this week involved getting very involved with RigidBody behaviour and changing the way our player object exists in our scene. So, no major discoveries took place there as the work on the technical side was mainly refactoring, translating our movement code to be RigidBody based, and incorporating all of our previous functionality into the new single-player system.
• Beyond that, our other focus was level design, which didn’t yield any important discoveries given our good understanding of the shadow system. The way shadows behave translated very naturally from our single corner testing level to our new fully established first level.
• The real discovery of the week is that creating a level where many people are working at the same time on different features is hard. Communication is not just extremely important, but everyone must be on the same page as everyone else so that the features and objects that one developer needs for the task they are doing do not interfere with the way the features and objects of another developer work.