This week was a weird one. With a long break stretching from the weekend to Tuesday, the end of this sprint is a little different than the usual. As a result, there were a few tasks that didn’t get done exactly we wanted them to.
In-Engine
This week, I was able to work a little engine. The things I did were kept small in scope and were only small additions to make work in the future easier.
The first thing I did was to slightly change the way one grabs evidence. In previous builds, there was a trigger around the evidence that you had to walk into to be able to collect it. While this worked well for a prototype, it was something testers kept mentioning was weird, or they would struggle to grab evidence. So, as a new way to grab evidence, I used raycasting to shoot a ray from the center of the player's screen (or face) to detect evidence based on what that line hits. This feels a lot more natural for players, since most first-person games with interaction mechanics depend on looking at an object to interact with it.
While making these changes, I made a small distinction that will help with the future of “interactable” objects. I defined a collision type of interactable for this raycast to look for, so with objects such as the door, the raycast can detect only the things that the player will be interacting with.
Lastly, I made a door which the player can open and close, when it is not already moving. It’s fairly simple and rudimentary at the moment, but our programmer will be likely making it function better so that the A.I. in the game can interact with it while chasing the player.
Art Implementation and QA
This week, we also had additional plans to implement some art into the game to have a more realistic looking environment to do some informal QA with. Unfortunately, it happened that our artist had a fairly busy weekend with the aforementioned break and was not able to have time to work with me to build out a level. So implementing art will take a while longer than anticipated, which can work, since our artist will need more time to create door models for the next sprint. The good news is that our informal QA was still able to be done by our producer, so even if we didn’t test art in the game, we still got some more opinions about the game.
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