Multiple Dev Diaries - 4 OCT

24 SEP 2020

Ship Project

This week was spent working on my first solo Unity game. There was also the game jam, but that has its own entire post, so we’ll stick to talking about this. The point of this game is it will mirror a fairly common top-down tank game, but I’m hoping to add enough functions that it is more original. First of all, I’m finally going to try making this game controller-accessible so that more people are able to play it comfortably. Second, I’m going to make it in the theme of Ships (partially because I’ve been playing so much Sea of Thieves), because I like the aesthetic a bit more than the standard tank game. As such, this will have more nautical powerups, such as ghost cannons that can pass through islands. 

26 SEP 2020

Ship Project

The first, and most basic, milestone is complete. You can shoot, move, kill enemies, and gain score. The really hard part is working on the game being MUCH more modular. Rather than putting 800 lines of code on one script and hoping nothing breaks, I’ve been making sure that each script is working in harmony with others. This means that when I eventually make it multiplayer, both players and enemy AI will all be using the same script that just gets called by different controllers. It’s a bit hard to wrap my head around, but I think it will make finishing it up a lot easier. A lot of my older projects I’m terrified to return to because they are just. so. Messy.

29 SEP 2020

Ship Project

Using the Character Controller provided by Unity came with a few bugs that I wasn’t happy with. As such, I spent the day reverting everything to Vector movement. The hope was to use Addforce so that the player slowly starts and slowly stops, but the trouble is that the force is calculated regardless of angle being turned, and thus the boat drifts very hard. I believe I have a theory to fix it, but for now regular vector movement will have to do. 

1 OCT 2020

Ship Project

Worked on more complicated ship movements. I have a patrol up and running, but I wanted there to be various patrol conditions to make them more interesting. So far, I have looping between waypoints, randomly choosing them, moving to the end and returning, and just stopping. One thing I keep missing is to ensure I’m not looking for the player who is controlling the ship’s transform, but the ship itself. These connections are only one or two characters long to correct but completely change how it functions. 

4 OCT 2020

Project Violet

My current workload requires that I keep up with my Ship-Tank project, but I really want to get Project Violet cranked out. My lead artist has become discouraged due to trying to animate the main character, so I think I’ll end up resorting to just using assets available elsewhere. My current goal is to focus on completing the level design and fine-tuning the last of the programming so that the only thing left is the art and sound. So far, I managed to prototype and playtest a section of the last level. As Miyamoto once said, always work on your first level last.