Entry 14

 Fall Week 13 & 14 Worklog

11/20/2024

(I am a bit late with writing this entry and didn't really take good note as to what I did today, it hasn't been too different from other other worklogs though and again I worked for about 4ish hours today) 

I continued to work away at modeling, mostly with wrapping up the subway layout and continuing work on Press 'N Hold.

Speaking of that latter level, I decided to do some coding today as well because I need to get back at that. I began to implement the canons follow and shoot actions, which I have a good start on. I need to tweak the delay on the canon firing and adjust the ball physics/speed, but it works so I don't expect that to be too bad.

Honestly I think I'm going to go back into maya and adjust the size of the tent and environment in general, as I realize the ceiling is too high up which will make keeping track of the canons rather difficult for the player.

11/25/2024

As said in the last entry I decided to squash down the tent model as it felt a bit too large, and I definitely feel like this resize helped. I also decided to move the placement of the canons, as with them being all the way against the wall it still was hard to see.

With that out of the way, now I had to focus in on getting the cannonball physics right because well...

They were a bit quirky right now. My problem was the bounce physics material and how it interacts with other surfaces. So, to solve this and also keep the balls inside the arena, I duplicated and extended the arena gate upwards (and then deleted the mesh renderer so its just an invisible wall basically), and added the bounce material to it. That way, the balls keep their bounce and momentum.

While they still aren't perfect and I'll definitely be fixing things as I go, it's definitely getting closer to what I am envisioning. I definitely need to fix the launch speed and also make the balls despawn after a certain amount of time passes. (also for some reason they stopped rotating...?)

Another thing I did during this work session was get the button to detect if the player was on it or not. You can see that in effect in the lower lefthand corner.

11/30/2024

Not a whole lot to say regarding today's work (only for about an hour or so) but I've started getting the code in for the countdown timer in Press 'N Hold. As of writing it correctly starts counting down when the player is on the button and pauses when they're off of it, but I still need it to stop at 0 (it'll keep counting down into the negatives) and let the player enter a "win" state (what'll most likely be a short animation before returning the player to the train, but for now I'll just have Debug.Log spit something out)

12/2/2024

Again, not much to say regarding today's session as it was mostly locking in and continuing with PNH's code for about 3 hours. A very.... hitting a brick wall kinda day, I wound up tearing my code apart a few times trying different methods to get the timer to stop and detect a "win" state correctly but I wound up over-complicating my code with what I was trying to do, so I scrapped pretty much all the changes I made today and am back to where I started.

12/3/2024

If yesterday was the beginning of me locking in to finish PNH's basic code, today that was in full swing as I was at it for a whopping 12 or so hours today (I took breaks don't worry). And I did what I set out to do finally! The timer was working correctly, hitting zero and getting into a "win" state, really the only bug with it at the moment is the fact that sometimes when Doc gets hit with a ball it'll take them off the button for a second and then put them back on which... causes the timer to count down by 2 instead of 1? No idea why, but this is a problem for future me.

I had cannons to move onto!!! At the moment, they'd fire as soon as the game ran which is not what I wanted. I wanted them to only begin firing once the button was pressed for the first time which was pretty straightforward to deal with honestly. All I had to do was add a bool to the button function script to toggle the cannons, and then have that bool talk to my cannon script(s) and yeah! 

Also, side note, but somewhere during all of this I also fixed the problem I was having of the cannonballs not rotating. I just had to re-implement the friction on the bounce physics. While yes this did change how they bounce slightly I think it ultimately improved them (on top of well, making them look visually better to)

It was after taking another 2 hour break for dinner and such that I decided to make some changes to how the cannons functioned. See, at the moment I had it so that all 3 followed the player, which while it worked was. Kinda boring? There wasn't as much chaos with the cannonballs as I was hoping. SO! I decided to change the two cannons that were on the sides to just rotate up and down on an interval, that way the direction the cannonballs are coming from is more randomized and they have a better chance of bouncing off one another.

To do this I just duplicated my cannon follow script and removed all the player targeting stuff. I also had to fix how the cannonballs were fired as for some reason in the follow script I didn't need to use addforce which was kind of strange but ok. 

With that working now all I had to do was just add an animator the made the cannons rotate up and down, add an animation bool for that to trigger alongside the cannons firing, and I decided to call it done for now! 

*I also decided to move the placement of the cannons so the player could have an easier time keeping track of them to, also it just didn't make sense to have the player turn around right after entering to face the follow cannon.

 

My work for the rest of the night after this was finishing up my 2024 Fall Semester progress slideshow for class tomorrow, which to summarize is pretty much just me showcasing the various in-progress screenshots/gifs that are in these log entries.

 While putting together the slideshow I apparently never got an updated screenshot/gif of the subway interior, so that was another thing I did.

 Also I guess updating this log is also apart of today's work session. So yeah that's been my night.