Disclaimer: Appending Electric Boogaloo to the end of a title refers to a sequel. Its a pretty funny meme.
The team used this week as well as the previous one to plan out the first level as well as the different assets that would be needed to complete level 1. Our asset creators created creative assets including various trees, rocks and other components that we programmers could then put into the game. Our original plan was to create the environment as one large image however we noted issues (read: takes time, like forever) and instead opted to modify the art direction to simplify asset creation as well as to shave time off of development of aforementioned assets. The artists then began development of the assets as well as the character animation models and such. This includes our main character (Solis, the 10 some-odd old child) who needs an idle, walking, climbing, jumping, and tossing animations to match our gameplay mechanics. Aside from this, the rest of us (two of us out of four total) began to code the rest of the mechanics into the game as well as fix any issues (my issues) we found with previous code snippets.
I personally am a coder and as such my job was to transfer code snippets from the test environment into our live environment. This seems fairly straightforward no? No. It is not straightforward. It is as if you were told to go straight but every step you take the path shifts to the left or right or down and backwards and nothing makes sense and its not fun after a point and you want to give up but you keep going because the team needs you and there is no "I" in team. The code we needed, tossing, pushing and pulling as well as camera zoom out triggers works in the test environment, but that wasn't so simple in the live environment. There was a ton of problem solving and collaborating to overcome these challenges. Currently, as you are reading this I am writing this but I am also working on coding the rest of the mechanics we need into the live environment so we can then add assets.
The biggest challenges I fear will arise are consolidating the code snippets from the test environment into the live one without errors. So far, we have managed to include tossing and camera zoom in triggers but pushing and pulling is still an issue we need to resolve. Following this we need to find a solution to creating a ray cast that will display the field of vision for enemies. A challenge definitely, but one we must face head on. Thank you for reading.
