Dev Log 5#

Alright folks here's the update, it's mostly non-interesting back-end related things (like slope detection, AI bug fixes):

1. Slope Detection
2. AI Bug Fixes and Improvement
3. Multi-Scene Editing (Unity 5.3.04f update)
4. Player Abilities
5. Demo release

1. Slope Detection

An important thing in any game is that the player doesn't treat slopes as walls, slopes are part of the floor but are different in the sole fact that they are at an incline, like a ramp. If not coded in you can have the player treating it as a wall, or being able to run up one but sliding down it constantly.

I think it took me about 2-3 days to get this working for both the player and the current list of enemies that need it.

2. AI Bug Fixes and Improvement

Like the title suggests, they have been a lot of AI bug fixes, mostly to the Ranuk (or Runak, we have no idea what to call it). There were a lot of small fixes and improvements, to do with detecting the player and turning to face the player.

I talked about it on our facebook page but not here so:

The biggest improvement I made to the enemy AI, which is something I will implement to all future additional enemies is that they have multiple colliders on two physics layers.

One which is "solid" makes it solid so it doesn't jump through walls and ceilings or fall through the floor and doesn't interact with the player at all, and a second one which is "non-solid" (it's a trigger collider, for those who use Unity) which only interacts with the player and his weapons. This means that there will never be an awkward moment when the enemy and player have trapped each other under or over each other and are completely unable to get out of the stuck position.

3. Multi-Scene Editing (MSE)

Thanks to the new 5.3.04f update from Unity, we now have Multi-Scene Editing (MSE) which will be super important and critical for when me and Frece come to designing the levels and blending them with the gameplay because it could potentially mean a completely seamless gameplay experience between the levels. 

4. Player Abilities

I finally got around to actually putting in ability items into the game, albeit with old art assets that I made a while ago which are now placeholders, but the main point is that I have them working and now the player can pick up ability items and use the respective ability.

(e.g. if the player picks up High Jump, they now have a high jump and can jump in their "morph" state, picking up a missile expansion lets the player use missiles [although there's no missile counter yet]). 

5. Demo Release

Me and Frece (you guys better know who this is by now) were talking about releasing a demo and we made a list of things which we need to finish first in order to release an Alpha Build demo.

In short, we'll need to replace all the player graphics, set up the main menu at least basically, I'll have to polish the Ranuk AI, we'd need to design a little test level and make some basic art assets for it and the ability items.


Stay tuned!