Devlog Week 2

Assignment 3 Devlog 2

This week, the planned work to get done was one of the boss attacks, of which I did manage to create one. Whilst I didn’t quite complete it how I wanted to, I also got some work done on the player attacks and the inverse kinematics for the bosses arms. 

Spike Attack

Firstly, I implemented the spike attack I talked about in last weeks devlog. The attack works by first spawning sprites across the ground a set distance apart, so the player can see and react to these locations. Afterwards, spikes rush out from the floor, those sprites that will damage the player if they fail to move in time.

The spike attack after the spikes have emerged, which will damage the player if caught on them. No I have no idea how the boss got rotated.

The middle of the spike attack, as the spikes are emerging

Whilst I am happy with how the attack has turned out, I did want to do a bit more with it this week. Firstly, I wanted to get the inverse kinematics working so I could make the arms slam down to spawn the spikes, and secondly, I wanted to make the boss have attack behavior so it could trigger the attack itself, instead of just showing it off by linking it to a keyboard button. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and got lazy, as well as couldn’t figure out inverse kinematics, so it didn’t quite work out.

Filter Issue

An early issue I ran into was that the sprites I tried importing into unity appeared blurry for some reason, which took some time to debug and turned out to be because a filter was being applied to them. This was fixed as soon as I switched the filter off

Blurry spike and clear spike. Sort of lost motivation to work on attack animation last week as it was blurry and I didn’t know how to fix it.

Inverse Kinematics

Whilst I tried to get the inverse kinematics working for the boss, I suck at maths and I purposefully didn’t pursue a robotics or engineering degree, so the results weren’t good.

The inverse kinematics for the bosses arm joints do work on one side, however when the player is on the opposite side, the best I can do is make the arm bend the wrong direction

Whilst this is a rather important part of the game, I can’t afford to spend too much more time on it as I’ve already spent too much and have so much else to do. As such, I am waiting to either think of a different method to make arms, hope that Ian or Lake can help, or will just get rid of them and move on without them.

The last thing I did this week was fix the player attack a little. Where previously, it was blurry and just wouldn’t appear whatsoever, no the player can press a mouse button to swing in a direction. There is still plenty to improve here, such as the attack speed, animation duration, and adding the ability to swing up and down, but it is still an improvement over the mess I left it in last week. 

Unfortunately, this is all I have achieved this week as I got really lazy and was binging One Piece episodes. I will try to catch up next week but no promises.

Valuable feedback from peer review session

• Have guy get skewered or knocked up a bit, have blood or similar particle effects
• Fix the inverse kinematics

Again, not much to show off yet, but having feedback for if you get hit and having knockback would be useful additions that were suggested. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to give feedback on.