Tiernan's Warren Tech Progress Blog

[tloguewarrentech]

May 5th, 2020

I accidentally slept in and missed the all-class meeting, but either way today I’m just going to keep working on what I was doing before the weekend, which is making the enemy AI for the deep underground game. 

I have a coroutine set to go off every few seconds that adds a force to the slime enemy based on the relative position to the player, so that it will always try to move towards the player. next I’m planning on making the bat code so that it will always go towards the player every few seconds for a set amount of time before pausing. 

[tloguewarrentech]

May 1st 2020

Wow, the year’s coming to a close and it’s all just now starting to really set in. Either way nobody has joined the discord group call yet so I’m just going to work on the stuff that Olivia has listed out for me in the trello, which is primarily just making enemies spawn in at specified points and actually giving them certain behaviors.

I’ve got a script written that takes an array of gameobjects representing the enemies, and then selects a random one from that array and instantiates it at its position, so hopefully I should just be able to make a prefab of this enemy creator that I can pepper throughout the level wherever an enemy needs to be, I haven’t actually tried it out yet so I should probably do that.

it seems to be working, at first I forgot that it instantiates the objects using worldspace coordinates rather than relative coordinates so it was just creating the objects right in the world origin so I did a quick fix so that it creates them at the spawner’s position, I should also probably add code that destroys the spawner once it’s been used, but that can wait for a while until I get the basic enemy scripts finished at the least. I would update this with more information but it’s getting a bit close to the deadline for this workblog for my liking so I’m going to go ahead and leave it for now, but I’m definitely going to be doing some work over the weekend.

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April 30, 2020

Today I’m primarily working on getting the physics all working properly for the game jam game that olivia is in charge of, by the looks of things we’re either going to scrap it altogether or work on it through next week depending on what happens tomorrow. I’m having troubles getting the player to properly interact with the slopes and making them slippery like they should be.

this is obnoxious to say the least

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April 23, 2020

wow, I don’t think I like being project manager. it’s surprisingly difficult to get clear answers from everybody as to what they do and don’t have done, as well as pushing people to get more work done so that we can have everything finished by the deadline

I’ve been taking a big part of the day to just put the game together, we’re running low on time and I need all of the art assets in asap but the artists can only work so fast

this update is due at 3:00 but I’m going to keep working probably for another twelve hours just to get this finished in time

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April 22, 2020

Today’s a much more programming-centered day for me, as we’ve pretty much figured out the story and how everything is going to play out, it’s just a matter of getting everything put together so that it works. I’ve completely reworked it so that instead of our old system it’s going to be more branching-path based.

I got my old typing code from the wyoming project set up so that it’ll go through an array of words and display them, and once it reaches the end it displays buttons for the player to click to make their decisions.

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April 21, 2020

Today is the first full work day on self investigation, and for now I’m taking more of a designer role for this project since I’m the project manager. Penguin and I have been figuring out the logic trees of how the different branches you can take are. I’m going to have to make a lot of scenes, one for each branch taken, which will make things more complicated

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April 17, 2020

Today is the beginning of the “Step Back” game jam and so I came up with an idea for a game that’s point and click where you start off by being killed, and you have to “step back” through the day talking to people (and figuring out your relationships with those people)

So far we’ve got 6 different character ideas (other than the main character) created, and I think I’m really starting to like the role of being a designer instead of just a programmer

We’ve got a pretty good base for the story line of how the day is going to progress from end to beginning for some of the different routes you can take

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April 16, 2020

I’m not going to be able to get as much as I usually could done today because we had to move our router today because the wifi’s been pretty spotty lately here at home Today I think I’m just going to be doing a little bit of polishing and cleaning up because we don’t really know what the next few weeks are gonna look like I made it so that whenever you buy an item from the shopkeepers the button to buy the item disappears.  I have to go now so I feel bad for not being able to get a lot done but that’s life in quarantine I guess

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April 15th 2020

I’ve heard that we might be doing weekly game jams so I don’t know if I’m going to be working on roads in the coming weeks or not but for the day I think I’m probably going to work on making the shop look and function a bit better Okay so it turns out using the unity editor I can’t pass a function into a button that has more than one parameter so I might have to do a bit of reorganizing so that by default it’ll give the player an item with value 0 (nothing) and have a different function that also gets called and sets the value of the item to give the player. okay I got the multiple values for one button press thing working by using a predefined variable but I think that I have the order of my nested if and for statements mixed up because it added the item to every slot in the inventory instead of just the first available one.  yeah turns out I just needed to rearrange my if and for statements to check if the slot that it was trying to add an item 

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April 14th 2020

Today I think I’m gonna make an actual inventory system for the player in the Sun’s script since it’s gonna persist between scenes. I think the most difficult part is gonna be figuring out what kind of array to make it, but I’m assuming that I’ll probably just have it use an integer system with each item being associated to a specific number; So after doing a bit of groundwork setup (establishing variables, assigning integer values to different items that can be bought) I’ve realized I’m going to have to do a bit of brushing up on how arrays work, especially in c#, we don’t have a limit on the inventory space yet so I’m just going to try and get an array set up that increases in size every time you obtain an item so there isn’t any unnecessary wasted memory on the unused inventory slots, but if I remember correctly from my java class I might end up having to use an arraylist instead so that the size can be manipulated easier; okay so it looks like if we wanted a changeable size inventory system I’d have to make a new list every time, move the items over to the new list, and replace the original list with the new one, so instead I’m just going to set the size of the inventory to 40 because I doubt we’ll need much more space than that if any,  Alright so I think I got something figured out a good system for moving items into the player’s inventory and while I would love to explain it in great detail through normal people speak I’d rather just put the code for the function I wrote here under the “read more” hopefully all I’ll have to do is tie the buttons in the shopkeeper UIs to call the sun’s GiveItem function and it’ll give the item to the player, and take the right amount of money

public void GiveItem(int moneyToTake, int itemToAdd)    {        var hasGiven = false;        if (moneyToTake <= Money)        {            Money -= moneyToTake;        }        if(!hasGiven)        {            for (int i = 0; i < Items.Length - 1; i++)            {                if(Items[i] == 0)                {                    Items[i] = itemToAdd;                    hasGiven = true;                }            }        }    }

[tloguewarrentech]

Week of April 7, 2020

Tuesday: Today started off with me going directly to ollie, our current sound expert for help with the beat speed, and it turns out that it wasn’t an issue with update but instead because I had the bpm slightly offset, they were able to figure out I had it going slightly faster than needed so now that I have it at 131 bpm instead of 130 it seems to be lining up a lot better with the song. I made a very basic visualization system where it activates and deactivates a canvas with a white box image attached every beat Now I’m working on getting coroutines (which I just found out about) to work so that they’ll do a character by character typing of the text that characters have to say to the player.

Wednesday: I got the coroutine for the text scrolling set up and I think it actually looks pretty good, next I think I’m gonna work on having a button system set up so that the player can quickly change out who’s in the front (and thus, who’s going to be fighting the enemies) whenever they need to I’m trying to make it so that when the player presses the spacebar then it will activate/deactivate certain parts of code for each object, but it’s looking like I’m just going to have to make a separate empty object that the player actually moves around while the visible objects just follow it, the biggest issue that I seem to be having is that while I can change the position of one character by using a variable for how far away from the leader it should be, (0, 1, 2, 3) but I think I can get the other characters to work just fine by having every other one subtract the reference point’s position relative to their own and go based off of that

Thursday: Today I’m going to work on making the shopkeeper’s UI system so that they’re able to sell the player items for a currency we haven’t really determined yet but that’s okay. I’m guessing I’ll have to set up some sort of inventory system that the player can easily access to actually show the items that they have bought and can use. I just realized I never actually implemented the code I mentioned at the end of yesterday so I’m gonna try and get that in and then work on making the shop system okay so making this work has been a lot more challenging than I expected, I might have to use an array to get this to work but I’m not sure exactly how I would implement that to work properly so I’m gonna visualize it a bit in google docs with a table to see if I can make it work. OH MY GOD talk about overcomplication I just needed to move the function for changing the followerplace into a script that’s attached to all of the moving characters that just subtracts it at the press of a button and sets it to the highest number if it ever becomes 0. I’m done for today anyways it’s getting pretty late in the day so I’ll deal with the shop system tomorrow.

Friday: Today I’m going to set up the shop system like I thought I was going to yesterday I have a basic system set up so that the player can interact with a shopkeeper, it pulls up the shopkeeper menu, and there are buttons that the player can click on corresponding to each item that subtracts a static money variable from the Sun’s code so that the player’s money will stay consistent between scenes when it comes to that. I also have it check that the amount of money it’s trying to take is always less than or equal to the amount that the player has so that they’ll never go in the negative. I plan to next week actually set up the inventory system for the player, but I’m not sure whether I should make it a part of the player’s script or the sun’s, likely the sun’s though.

[tloguewarrentech]

April 3rd, 2020

Today I think I’m going to try reworking the battle system some more so that it works off of Time.deltaTime instead of the update function So far I haven’t found a good way to completely replace update with Time.deltaTIme so I’m gonna reach out to mr compton on what he thinks the best way to approach the situation would be I haven’t gotten a response yet so until then I’m gonna try working on the walkaround portion again I made a simple setup for the npc interactions so that when the player is close enough to an npc and presses e they’ll do something, I have yet to set up their visual overlay but it shouldn’t be too hard to put together with a canvas for some reason whenever I try interacting with the npc instead of setting the canvas to active, it deactivates the npc so he disappears, we’re wrapping up pretty soon so I’m gonna leave that problem for tuesday

[tloguewarrentech]

April 2nd 2020

I’m gonna make some basic wandering AI for the enemies and follow AI for when the player gets close to the enemy. I also already set up another object like The Sun in Lad VS that’s going to house all of the global variables but this time with Patrick Warburton instead of Todd Howard... Don’t ask I have an enemy wandering AI that I think is gonna work pretty well, I have a system so that the developers will be able to change things like the speed of the enemy when it’s chasing you, the distance away it needs to be in order to spot and chase the player, as well as how often the enemy will change directions while wandering.

[tloguewarrentech]

April 1st, 2020

Today I think I’m going to make a visual system for the beats to make it easier to A. identify when the game thinks the beats are vs when I do and B. better visualize the rhythm in general. After that I think I’ll probably take a break from the whole fighting system just for a while and work on making the actual walkaround open exploration part. I’m trying to make a similar beat visualization system to that of Crypt of the necrodancer with just lines that move towards the middle and a box to show when the player should input a command. I’m trying to set it up by having the speed that the bars should move at calculated by the length of the screen divided in half, divided by the amount of beats between when the bar is created at the edge of the screen and when it hits the mid-point, divided by the amount of beats per second, divided by the amount of frames in each second but for some reason instead of giving me a value of 1.875 for the bars’ speeds, it’s giving me infinity so something is definitely wrong but I have no idea what exactly that is. Now it looks like a few more people are jumping on to the project after the design meeting from earlier, so this is looking kinda hectic, I’m still not sure if I’m the only programmer on the project or not because not everyone has joined the voice chat, but I guess we’ll just see what happens The most challenging part of the walkaround feature looks like it’s going to be making the party members follow around the leader of the group at the time.

[tloguewarrentech]

March 31, 2020

Today I’m working more on getting the fine tuning of the bpm-based rhythm system working. I’ve fixed the problem with calculating the offset between the game’s beats and the user’s, I keep changing the offset time but for some reason I can’t seem to get a good grasp on what the right offset is, I also changed from using TiK ToK by Kesha to using Die Young because it has a much steadier and easier to follow beat, I realized that there was an issue with the way I was calculating the beats per second because when I put in the beats per minute for Die Young (128 bpm) it was coming out as exactly 2 beats per second just like Tik Tok (120 bpm) and I realized that was from having the bom variable set as an int rather than a float, so it was dividing with integers and thus giving me an integer result. I set up a system so that unity will take all of my attempted inputs throughout the entirety of the song and average them out so that it’ll give me a (hopefully) good offset time to test out, I also made the offset variable into a slider in unity so I can change it easier by just moving it to the best offset number We also decided it would be a good idea to have some sort of visualizer for the beats so the player has a better understanding of when to input their attacks, movements, etc. So I’m trying to figure out how that’s going to work

[tloguewarrentech]

March 19 2020

Today I’m making more fine tuned features to the code I made yesterday so that now the player can only attack when they’re close to on beat, and the support characters can also only help on the beat, which has required me to add a variable for how offset the average beats per second are from the start of the game, so that instead of the game’s “beat” being slightly different from the song’s, they’re more coordinated. TiK ToK by Ke$ha is starting to get annoying but it’s a good reference for me to use because it has 120 beats per minute, which averages to 2 beats per second

I’m trying to figure out how to get unity to tell me just how “off” I am when inputting beats so that I can adjust the offset accordingly but nothing I’ve tried has worked, I’ve tried subtracting the total time in game both by and from the total beats passed divided by the beats per second to tell me how off I am, but I’m getting the exact same “.05” every time, so now I need to figure out how to solve that problem so I can keep moving forward

[tloguewarrentech]

March 18 2020

Today I’m working on making the actual rhythm game-like portion of the battle system, which has actually proven to be quite a bit easier than I would’ve imagined at first, the idea that I’m toying around with the most is just having prefabs for whatever song is going to be playing during the fight with a script that I can change the beats per minute with for each individual song, and then converting that beats per minute into beats per second because unity’s Time.time function is measured in seconds, so I can use it to figure out how many beats have passed by multiplying the amount of seconds passed by the amount of beats that there are per second. Then using that amount I’m able to take the modulo 1 of those beats passed to see if the player is performing inputs on-beat or not. After creating a system that makes the power of the attacks related to how close to the beat the player is, I figured out how to move the attacks along at the speed of the music so that the player can also boost the attacks with certain powers on beat with the music, I did that by using unity’s Mathf.floor function to check when the beat has moved on to the next one, meaning that the attack has moved forward