STILTS by Burning Exploding Trainwreck | Devlog 1 & 2 | KIT207

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

Introduction

Welcome to the first devlog, already messed up from the Easter break! Throwing everything into disarray. Every week, the Burning Exploding Trainwreck will show off what we have done this week and talk about it. (Week being a loose term)!

Wait, what the heck is this about?

-Cailean

This, (and following devlogs) is about STILTS a rage game we are putting together, placing the player on a pair of stilts and then making them walk their way through all sorts of scenarios you should NOT have stilts on.

Initial Setup and the viscous viscount of Version Control!!!!

- Cailean

Before we could create the project and develop, we needed to decide on a method of sharing and keeping up to date with the project when all of us were making changes. We need to decide between using GIT or Unity Version Control. Both have their advantages, like GIT being free or Unity being geared for.... unity. (what we are developing the game in). We settled on Unity cause it will probably save us some headaches later. Although it wasn't so easy to implement.

- Ross

The most difficult part of using version control is signing up and paying for version control. It honestly felt like Unity didn't want to take our money as far as version control was considered. However, once we were finally able to work out a payment method (thank you Ian for guiding us through the process of working out how to set up a payment method), Unity version control has been fairly wonderful in terms of ease of use.

Level Design

- Ross

We have started crafting the base level of our game as well as incorporate various obstacles and movement mechanics for the player to overcome. Currently, we have been able to introduce;

1. An ice mechanic which will cause the player character to move forward in the direction they hit the ice
2. A lava mechanic which will cause the level to reset when the player touches it (although future versions of this will cause the stilts to "burn" first, before resetting the game)
3. A mud mechanic which slows the speed of the character down when they encounter it
4. A movement mechanic on objects wherein the goal of the player is to dodge the object least they be thrown over or off the platforms in which they stand.

Modelling and Art

-Cailean

For modelling, we are still heavily in STILTS's design and development phase.  While we may use some free assets like from the Unity store, to get the message across, we want to use some of our custom art pieces to enhance our product. 
This , of course, brings us to the main player character who will use the stilts. Our pitch document had many different Stilt designs, and in real life there are different types like whatever the heck these are. 

Or more traditional wooden stilts. 

So with all these competing designs. I decided to whip up some quick mock-ups to decide  what we might do for the player character.





And the return of bagman! (look at my personal devlogs for kit207 wink wink)
Basically, just using a character to mock up what the stilts might look like.








In the end we decided to work around this design.

Furthermore, I did some refinement with some sketches to get the vibes for the character which will be low poly, as well as stilt shape.


Next week (or this week) I'll be attempting to implement this fully and started the proper development of the character.

Ask yourself this question though, should the stilts drive the character or the character drive the stilts.

Implementing Stilts in STILTS

Winston - 

Now, it goes without saying that the most important part of a game called STILTS is, well, the stilts themselves. And so, immediately after assembling a quick placeholder for our character model, we set to work with bringing STILTS to life.

The first aspect of our implementation is Unity's Input System Package. This replaces the legacy Input Manager, which relied on manually assigning and using key binds directly via the Input API; instead allowing us to assign all the axes and key inputs in a single place, which can then be easily referenced in our scripts.

Next, was a matter of writing the code that will allow us to directly control the player character's in-game movement. For the purpose of testing this, we've created a new scene that allows us to test the controls and ensure they fully work before implementing it into the main scene.

At the current time, the code is fairly basic, but allows for the player to raise and lower both stilts, independently move the stilts, and change the rotation of the player character in order to balance. However, at the current moment, the effectiveness of the movement is... not great.

----------------------------------------------------------------

NEXT WEEK, on STILTS.
Expect procrastination, jank and more development news from all areas. (Lets hope we make some good progress....)

The clock is ticking!

- Cailean

References:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com.au%2F61-100cm-P...
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bunnings.com.au%2F180cm-wa...