Simple Games Dev Blog

We are going into the last sprint of our project. I spent the time working on polishing effects and implementing new sounds that we got. A few bugs that I found out about on the  Spear trap that when any thing passed through it triggered so it was changed over to only on Player. For the sounds that were added are for when a weapon hits stone or wood. To stop the player from just sitting on the side of the maps and not engaging in combat Jash and myself created a time that drops a boulder on top of the players that are alive.

This week was a lot of tuning game play. I added a attack speed to each of the weapons. This week I also started working on a crowd reaction to allow for cheering when a player kills another and boo when killed by traps or them self's. The first problem I ran into with this was that I could not figure out how to blend from a montage into the animation for the reaction that was needed. A way that I fix this was by creating a State Machine for the crowd to allow for a more blended and even distribution of the crowd.

This week I created a way for the host to start a new round once the current round is over. For when the player has only there fist I created a color change when the player is hit and a regan for after a few seconds. There was a few focus issue with the pause menu that while in the lobby it was causing the player to start the game when they were trying to leave. This was because input was still being passed on both the UI and the Game its self. Since this is the start of our final month I started focusing on finding game breaking bugs and seeing what we needed to do to fix them. A few of them were easy fixes that either something wasn't replicated correctly or a variable was forgotten when pushed to the server.

Remember what I talked about last week? Where I talked about switching to a collider-based hit detection? And I only had two days to do it? I GOT IT TO WORK! It worked good, I had my bugs where some were registering too many hit detections at once, which I solved by applying a buffer where after I detected a hit, I would prevent it from registering a hit again with a few bools here and there. Projectiles were being blocked great by this, cause all they were doing is being stopped by a collider in front of players. Thanks to that collider, our weapon catch was finally able to be done. Blocking also worked great, I just put a trigger box in front of someone when they were blocking with a shield, and whenever someone came inside the trigger box he would always get blocked, but when he left the trigger he could land his attacks. Simple, thanks to a few changes here and there. Our gameplay improved a lot with my changes, which ultimately made me proud.

I got all the combat mechanics to work, and I changed our control scheme to how we wanted it from the beginning. I had a bit of trouble with one of our inputs, because our designer wanted one button on click to perform an action, but when it was held it performed another action instead. I got to get it working based on a timer when button is clicked. The problem was, it really didn’t work based on how we thought it would. It just didn’t feel right. Luckily, I didn’t delete anything that was set previous and I quickly reverted to the way it was. At this point, I’m tweaking our combat system, but I’m still having issues with having the right hit detection happen due to the detection system that our fellow member implemented. I reached out to our mentor in talks to switch everything to a collider-based system, in which he agreed. I had two days to get it done, which seemed crazy but I’ll do my best.

Found out that one of our fellow members had to leave our team, which only meant that our workload was going to be even greater now. We took the news well, and quickly planned who’s doing what. I picked up most of his work, which were involved in networking tasks. I was working on our replication issues, where player actions & animations weren’t being displayed to other players. I was also helping Matt with his replication of the traps, just having the ability to show their animations to everyone & telling everyone that such player has died. Most of my time, I was trying to figure out how our fellow member’s hit detection system worked. He made a system that detected when a hit should register based on an angle check, and a distance check. It was good, but it also had its flaws. Deflecting projectiles, and blocking against other attacks was much harder now. I made the best I could with his system, but at this point I’m not a fan of how it works.

To The Death - Beta

I also updated the collision boxes and added sounds to the traps that we are using in the maps for the game. I then moved onto creating three themed maps for our Roman level.

I have two tasks this week. First, I’m going to work on our projectiles, and I’m going to help Jeff on replicating his new character select menu. Basically, even if you had a shield equipped, the projectile would still be a sword. So, I made different projectile versions for the different type of weapons. Also, I’m having issues with adding gravity for the projectiles, for some reason it’s not working for me. I’m going to keep that in the back for now because that’s not uber important right now. Now with Jeff, his menu is working, just that it needs replication. As always, we tell all the clients of the actions what we’re performing. In this case, we had to replicate which player number I am, which is my color, and if I’m ready to play. Those took us a while, but ultimately, we got it done!

I have also started working on a weapon rack that over time will spawn up to two weapons on it at any time and highlights to let the players know that they can pick up from them.

Towards the end of this three weeks I began working on adding blood particles to when a player is killed. That be via another player or the player dying to a trap.