By Cailean Treloyn, Ross Vandenberg, Winston Stuart and Aymen Abdalla

Welcome

-Cailean

Welcome back to the weekly devlog for STILT(?). Now, you may be wondering, why the question mark? Well in the past devlog we talked about the problems with the stilts the balancing, and the physics and all the issues caused us to go back to the drawing board, but also we needed to get the game into a state which will allow use to get ready for the testing session this week. (Which you can find here. (add link) Now on to what we actually did.

Modelling

-Cailean

Welcome to the modelling section, in order to get us to a better state for the testing. I wanted to implement some of the models I've been developing, let's talk about it. First off, in our concept art we wanted the game to be city themed, so I generated this building,

This building I generated using generally simple techniques, It heavily revolves around using planes, then adding geometry and extruding it inwards to create the windows and doors, a way I cheat is instance variables in blender if you press ALT D, you can create instances of an object then replicate that around, editing one will edit them all, saving lots of time. This approach makes it very easy to make modular buildings, all different shapes and sizes, rapidly iterating, which I think is pretty neat.

Next up was the character, obviously we need to someone use our stilts (?) Using the character, Its time to rig it, I used automatic weights but they caused of grief...

Yeah, not so great.

I then needed to create some manual weights, but that also led to some funny shenanigans.

I quite enjoy making it work, but eventually it was pretty fun to make. I then placed this on the on the STILTS(?).

If your catching on thats a pogostick that I posed the man on. Which Winston will talk about next!

Movement - A New Hope

- Winston

Well, as I'm sure you've no doubt noticed by now, but this doesn't look very much like a game about walking on stilts anymore. As such, this new gameplay direction required a complete overhaul (and by 'overhaul', we mean 'scrap it and start over') of the movement system. Thankfully, for the sake of the project's forward progression (and my own sanity), this new movement system actually works! So, let's now take a deep dive into how this new movement system functions.

So, now that this game now revolves around using a pogo stick, the two most important aspects of the new movement system are being able to jump and being able to change the direction of your jump. Both of these aspects can be implemented using the Rigidbody physics system, with the jump mechanic being implemented as a charge system. By holding an input down (in the current build, this is RT), you gain charge in a meter. Once you release the input, that charge is used to apply a force in the upward direction. It's worth noting that for this mechanic, the 'upward direction' is defined locally, rather than globally. This will be important later.

Now, being able to jump is fantastic, but it's not much of a game if you can't change where you're jumping to. So, the second half of the new movement system involves allowing the player to control which way they are jumping. To do this, we've again used Rigidbody physics to apply rotation to the character when the player moves the analogue sticks, with the left stick leaning forward/back and left/right, and the right stick rotating the character left/right. There is also some code that stops the character from leaning further once the stick is released, which will help ease the difficulty somewhat, as the majority of the difficulty will come from the level design.

And speaking of level design, it's time to pass back to Cailean to discuss it!

Level Design

-Cailean

For the scene for testing. It was pretty simple, take our old scene which had grey boxed buildings (aka just cubes). And replacing them with this place holder building. The problem with the level design as it stands right now is that it was geared towards stilts not this new movement system that is focused around jumping, we'll get feedback on this through the testing, but we may need to redo this in the future.

UI

-Aymen

A new charge bar has been added to the UI. It hovers near the player and visually represents how much jump power is charged. This helps players time and strategize their jumps more effectively and adds polish to the movement system.

Conclusion

-Cailean

As we have alluded to before testing is right around the corner, this will inform the lots of the development decisions for this project in the future. We will get useful feedback to see if our idea even has promise and will gain valuable insights on what we can improve. We will continue to improve the game and hopefully get it done.