Here We Go Again Sprint 3

  

 Here We Go Again: Sprint 3

Joy Schulze: Programmer

    Last sprint, I felt like I surpassed the goals that I set for myself, so this sprint I shot higher. I planned to ride the momentum that I had from the last sprints to not only implement all of the touch controls, but also our fusion mechanic and spells as well. All of this alongside setting up our first electronic prototype was a huge challenge that I attempted… and did not fully complete. While I did do some of the stuff I wanted, I didn’t even get to scratch the surface of our spell system as I struggled with implementing touch controls.

It started off fairly easy, just make the player shoot magic at the enemy when you tap on them. I haven’t used Unity’s new input system, so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I managed to get it working fairly quickly. I also had to alter the way that hitboxes work to make it easier to tap on the enemies. WIth the wind in my sails, I started working on getting touch and drag controls so that way the player could move their units around before combat starts.

This took me about a week.

My struggles were a combination of not being too familiar with unity’s input system, the fact that I found 3 very different ways of doing it that all used different libraries, plugins, and Unity packages, and the way that I jumped between all of these different ways when I wasn’t finding success with one of them. I thought I was being agile by switching up my strategy each time I ran into issues, but it just ended up being slow.

Due to how long this took me, I was not able to implement it into the playtest that we had in the middle of our sprint. It was very disheartening to have to stop working on this and put a less complete prototype forward for my designer to hold playtests with.

However, I did get it working.

It uses Unity’s Input Action system, raycasts, layer masks, and some really really ugly if statements. While I was very frustrated with it when I initially finished it, I am very proud that I was able to figure it all out and make this all on my own. It feels nice to have the unit snap to the grid of the battlefield, and I was able to squash all of the bugs I found (so far).

And while it is pretty late, it’s better late than never to finish the main mechanic of our game: fusing units together.

Fusion allows the player to combine their units and make a more powerful unit to fight against your enemies. At the moment, this can increase your units’ attack speed, movement speed, and attack damage, but our designer is whipping up more ways for your units to fuse together. This took about as much time as I expected it would in the beginning when I thought I would crank out like 3 core features in 1 sprint. This is mostly an extension of the logic for dragging and dropping the units, but it still felt really good to get working. Even if it’s just a bit of placeholder UI, I like how I got the fusion level to show up next to the health bar.

Next sprint, I will be taking it a bit easier. Our designer has taken over the spells as he wants to do more programming (thank goodness) and I will work on more advanced enemies, boss fights, some UI, and maybe some stage hazards.

I am way more excited for this next sprint as I think we’re all set up to actually finish the goals we set out for. We will also have a way more interactive and fun experience for players to try, and we’ll actually get feedback on the full gameplayloop.