William Baran - Week 11 Devlog

Total Time: 7+ Hours

Levels In Engine:

I spent much of my time this week working on Level 2's layout in Unity. Certain gadgets weren't implemented yet so I added everything I could. I managed to place all the proper wires and gadgets where they were needed as well. But we decided on Sunday that in the best interest of having a built game come December, we would have to make certain cuts. We decided to scale our scope down again and replace Level 2 with Level 3. The reason for this is that Level 2 had a lot of gadgets that were yet to be coded and would cause our programmer Sarah to take on a lot more time coding. Since Level 3 already had the water blocks coded it made sense to cut Level 2 and replace it with Level 3. Although it is a shame, I agree that it is in the best interest of the team and project. However, since Level 2 content was no longer needed, those assignments have been removed from the Hansoft.

In Game Menu:

I spent more time this week working on the pause menu. I was still having the trouble of not having it function with the controller and assumed that my controller was the issue since it was a 3rd party controller. I managed to borrow two of my friend's PS4 controllers and began to use those instead. I then ran into the issue of one of the cords not working so I was still stuck with only using one controller until my new cord came in. Nonetheless, I checked to see if my controller was the issue and it wasn't. No matter what button I mapped it to, it didn't work. I then ran into the problem of the pause menu not even appearing when I hit the escape key. I was confused about why this was since it still paused the game, time-wise, but didn't bring up the menu. After spending some time rereading the code, I noticed an error where someone had added "namespace gizmo {}" containing the entire code. After commenting that part out, the code started to work again. I'm not sure why it prevented it from happening but the issue was resolved. After spending a couple of hours rewatching tutorials and rereading the code, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the problem was. Eventually, I asked Sarah for assistance and we used some of the class time today to brainstorm and troubleshoot. We believe we found a possible solution but it's going to be complicated given the co-op nature of the game.

Level Design:

Since Level 2 is now being cut, I was assigned to add two rooms to Level 1 to introduce the new gizmos for each player. I was able to repurpose the first room of level 2 to do this. The brain's room is almost identical while the body's room has some tweaks to it. Since we aren't using the fan gadget and possibly the spring, I had to change them while still maintaining the goal of teaching the differences between the new gizmos. I decided to utilize the transparent platforms that have been already coded. I still have to spend some time on the second and final room but I have some basic ideas sketched for it.