This week we started the first production sprint. A lot of time went into planning this sprint and all future sprints on Hack n Plan, resulting in fewer tangible results than we would have liked. However, we managed to improve upon our previous prototypes and start welding together our work.

1. Level Design: How should our level layout look like?

We created an early layout to discuss possible pitfalls. Noticeable are the strong bends in certain places, which would require the payload to pivot correctly at certain points. We solved this by implementing a round payload, merely requiring a translation. Furthermore, as we are working in different 'stages' within a level, we decided to put checkpoints (in the form of gates). Reaching one such gate transports the payload to a new checkpoint, right between the following checkpoint and the one we just reached. The camera follows smoothly, players are respawned and the new stage begins.

2. Improving our core mechanics.

One point to improve was the movement with joysticks, which was too jittery and snapped to different axis. By using a new Unity Input Manager package we circumvented this and created smooth controls with joysticks. We added the possibility for a player to spawn and join the fray with a simple button press:

Additionally, we implented a new camera with smoothed movement and a camera anchor control system. The following gif showcase the idea of our level layout as discussed in the first paragraph:

Lastly, we started developing another core mechanic: booping players around. This is in early development, and provided no real opportunity to integrate in the main scene so far.

In the following week(s), we wanted to fully focus on developing our mechanics, further improving and tweaking them. We also aim to have at least a completely finished blockout for our level, which we can then use to better orientate how our payload has to move precisely, how fast should characters move considering the space they can occupy,... We also want to have a more finished version of our 'boop' technique, which is crucial for our gameplay and 'fun level'.