At the end of last week the team got together, sat down, and had a long discussion about which game we ultimately were interested in going forward with. It seemed like all of us felt the same level of interest for both ideas and were really excited about the development challenges that making either title would give us. In order to really weigh out our options, we decided to make pros & cons list for both concepts and took into account the amount of risks associated, possible player reactions, and general interest as developers, for each one. Afterwards we came to the decision to go forward with Pilgrimage (Working title of the island adventure game concept). At the end of this discussion the list was extremely uneven, with most of the cons pointing towards Racelight: Infinity (working title of the racer) as the safe and, ultimately, better pick for us. However, one con on Racelight's list was enough to tip the scales; that being the fact that about 2 to 3 months in when we get the core systems in the game and make a couple functioning vehicles the rest of the development cycle would most likely be a series of balancing, QA testing and more balancing with additional features added in "just because". All of us on the team were in situations similar to this on our games from last semester and were more willing to dive into the abyss of scope than suffer through that experience again. I may be a little dramatic I know, but you didn't work on a walking simulator for a semester so you can't judge me. Regardless, with our final game concept decided on we realized in order to make it happen we needed to get content into the game as fast as possible. My first set of tasks was to create the first pass on the combat system. The last iteration was pretty rudimentary and, well, bad, so I scrapped pretty much everything about it and started over. First we needed a character controller and a 3D camera, which is something I realized I had never done before as the 3D games I've worked on in the past either had no player movement or already had a camera in place when I joined the project. Luckily, I was able to find a script on the Unity forums that pretty much had exactly what I wanted so I grabbed it and made some changes to make it fit what we wanted for ours.
Afterwards came the hard part: combo systems. I'm personally a huge fan of pretty much any game that Platinum Games releases, the majority of which are fast paced spectacle fighters, so I was pretty excited to finally get a chance to work on some combo systems of my own. My main goal for this system was to make it in a way that would allow us to easily add, remove and change attacks and elements as we iterated on them, and in order to do that it would require some good architecture.
First I made a state machine to handle the player's movement and attack states, and afterwards I created a class to handle the players combat logic.
First pass on player's attacking state. Changed a lot since I wrote this post
Attacking state body. Kinda gross
When I finally started to write the code in the attack state I began to notice that things were getting a little hard coded and would most likely cause problems down the line, so I decided to change things a bit. Namely I removed the long if statement at the bottom and replaced it with a if-else block based on a "current state" enum I put in the player's combat script which I then change using animation events. I also removed the reference to the player's current attack to decouple the two a bit.
At the end of this week the team met to figure out what all needed to be done for next week. We made a long intimidating list of all of the features we wanted to have before midmortem presentations and began to come up with a roadmap for getting those things done. Next week I will be focusing on the combat mechanics and getting at least one power working for the player to use.
-Cory