What a wonderful week of brainstorming, sketching, designing and coding this has been. Throughout the week leading up till today (the 1st of February), the team fleshed out further details regarding the game world, the character as well as the enemies. The enemies were a big challenge we faced (which we valiantly overcame) since we had a specific ideal of their appearance, however making them distinctive enough, so players are not confused they are facing one enemy when they were facing another one. This was important because it would allow our talented artists to create unique and horrible enemies that players would not only have fun defeating (not killing, but distracting) but also be thoroughly frightened by. Today, the team began the process of developing the core mechanics i.e. movement in the Unity development environment. While the programmers (which includes me, I am also doing level design, a task which often requires a great deal of thought and planning as this is what the player will navigate through) began creating scripts the artists and game designers laid out the details for the first level. This first level will be included in the playable demo and is a tutorial level of sorts.
My job today was to aid our lead programmer with small tasks she had assigned me. This included scripting the movement and jumping (we rightfully checked that one off of our hypothetical checklist) as well as to begin scripting our secondary mechanic; tossing. This mechanic is an interesting challenge as it has two components, the picking up of an object (in this case a small pebble) as well as the tossing of the object (again, the aforementioned pebble). These two components are difficult to implement on their own, but together becomes even more challenging. However, its not we feel we can’t face together as a unit!
The largest problem I feel we are going to face is the utilization of SourceTree to share code. So far, we've had a few issues with pulling and pushing branches, but predominately the biggest is sending code to the repo and someone else downloading that code into their own folder all updated. Unity for some odd reason (truly odd) will not update at all with the changes I have made to the development environment. For example, if I attach a script to an object in Unity, upload that code to the repo, our lead pulls that code and opens Unity, Unity will not have those changes in place that I had made.
The above image is a hand-drawn depiction of the environment the player will see upon entering the game world.
