Sprint 5: Falling down the stairs with as much style as I can manage.

    Cutting is always a heartbreaking activity. All the stuff you worked hard on, missed out on other assignments to push through, time that could've spent elsewhere dropping into the void, nowhere to be found. Not to be overly dramatic, but I fully intend on being dramatic about it. My menu system was dropped, my controls menu was dropped, a significant portion of the things I worked on weren't in the final build, and the game turned out much better for the sake of it. It's hard to argue with the results, I just wished that I could say 100% of the things I worked on were productive and useful.

The new menu! In all its arguably functional glory.

    We ultimately completely overhauled the movement system, and the simple change from a two button input to a one button input turned the game infinitely more playable. Maybe we couldn't save the level design, maybe we couldn't save the game itself, but we were here to test a movement mechanic, and on the dawn of the final day, we got a movement mechanic that worked. Dan told us early into the week three sprint that he didn't care if we spent the whole sprint working on making our movement mechanic exciting, and I think if we accomplished absolutely anything, it was that.

You would be pissed too if weeks of coding resulted in a less playable game than setting one (1) option in a GUI.

Camera usability hack, from a coding hack.

    As far as I could tell from the feedback, the most enjoyable aspect of the game was the movement. Even if the way it was organized was extremely janky, we finally created something that was at least fun and functional. The fix was so embarrassingly simple I'm almost ashamed that it took us about ten weeks of real development time to hash it out; we finally just let the players move around while charging, and didn't make charging such a big deal. Now, players could actually explore, load a charge in for later, reposition if a jumping spot turned out to be bad, and so many issues we had with clunkiness, lack of feedback, everything just seemed to melt away.

    I'm still angry about it. I just wrote a single line that cut out all the other lines I wrote, and all of a sudden the game we wanted to make fell out of the rafters like a dead pigeon at CostCo. Infuriating! A lot of the changes I made were infuriatingly simple, like I took one section of the code for granted and it took a bulldozer to how the game felt. A simple change in variables made the charge meter infinitely more functional

    I fixed the checkpoints, made sure that they were functional and easy to use for the level, since starting at the beginning every single time was found to be utterly infuriating to the average player (and presumably anyone with a history of blood pressure issues), so I was happy to see that working and ready in the final build. Some aspects of the game were unable to be fixed. A misunderstanding of how I should change the fruits made sure that that mechanic was complete mush when the build was finalized. I’m still angry about it. I decided to take a route that made the most intuitive sense to me (take the prefabs for fruits we had and plug them into a scriptable object that would change the radius, material, and rigidbody properties), but the end result was a complete nightmare. We should’ve thoroughly playtested every fruit to figure out what the needed force, mass, and drag would be, but we scrambled and instead ended up with overwhelming mediocrity, mostly thanks to confusion as to what aspects of Unity’s physics system needed to be touched on to make it work.



    Overall, this project was a big, crazy, stupid mess. I was a mix of relieved, angry, and proud, and as time passes already, I can feel some more pride begin to bubble up in me. Or maybe that’s just the end result of me eating almost half a dozen donuts in the span of two hours. It’s hard to tell at this point.