Programming Weekly Development

Week 1-2: 8/28-9/11

We first decided on an RPG game with a central mechanic of glitches. We flushed out a basic story and began to decide on mechanics and filling out our GDD. However, no one had a real idea of what we wanted the final product to look like or play like. Without a leading "vision" for this project, it seemed like it was far too vague

Jeremy pitched his hell racers idea as something he could really get behind. The idea seemed really solid ad I was immediately on board. The glitch game, while a neat idea, was beyond the scope of completion for this class. It was far too broad. We pitched our new idea to the class and with a positive reception we got to work.

As he only person with the most programming experience (not a lot) coding fell to me. And so began my long trudge of teaching myself JavaScript while building the game.

Week 3-4: 9/11-9/25

We used this time to begin working with unity and further flush out designs and fill out our GDD. This was the point in time where we essentially put our entire game on paper. This allowed us to measure what we would be able to accomplish and set good goals for the remainder of the semester.

Week 5-6: 9/25-10/9

At this point we began searching for tutorials or instructions for how unity would handle a racing game. We ended up finding a tutorial that matched our needs perfectly. After completing it, I began messing with the code to try and get it where I needed it. Our finished tutorial product was presented to the class.

Week 7-8: 10/9-10/23

Colter had already successfully attached the AI control to the player car. I added the limited turning capability for the player. I also successfully added jumping and a stamina bar. I linked the ability to jump and turn to use stamina and had it refill slowly over time

Issues:

The stamina bar, despite being a drawn object whose color and shape I should be able to change, always remains a grey rectangle despite whatever code I use to try and change it.

The jump works by applying a simple upward force the vehicle. For some reason after the car accelerated to top speed, the same amount of upward force that shot the car 4 feet into the air will now only go up a couple inches.

Week 9-10: 10/23-11/6

This week was probably my greatest challenge. I was supposed to have working power ups to be able play test for the next milestone. After wasting much tie creating a mouse orbit function I discovered that unity came with its own.  I created a gun and attacked it to the player car. I bound the rotation of the gun to the mouse orbit, which was actually a lot harder than it sounded. I also got the gun working in respect to creating objects.

Week 11-12: 11/6-11/20

Obviously with only 1 player mode and no powers ups any play testing we did at this point would be negligible. I continued work on the power up gun. I successfully created an object that when shot, would stick to the track where it landed, and upon collision with any vehicle would violently increase their speed. I attempted to create a pickup system and another power up. But for some reason, the same collision methods used for the first power up would not work for the pickups and the second power up would not launch at all. It was only a simple if statement so I was completely baffled as to what went wrong.

Week 13-14: 11/20-12/4

I got the pickups and the power up working. For some reason, when I tried to move Colter's track and terrain into my scene, it replaced all of my game objects with his. This meant manually re attaching all the scripts and variables. After that nightmare was done I tried to begin moving controls to the XBOX 360 controller as we felt it would be the best fit for a racing game. I was informed that this was a simple process as I simply had to take where I used the horizontal keyboard input and replace it with the horizontal joystick input. This broke the waypoint system and car AI. I have no idea how. This was as far as our prototype got this semester. All that remains is the remainder of the power ups, balancing the numbers, successfully resigning the controls, and a multiplayer interface.