Week 4 - Fully Loaded

This week, I finished the core player components, finalizing the combat implementation and setting up for implementing other enemies. I also worked with the team on fleshing out the functional flowboard and core gameplay loop of Tower of Ash, while also coming up with more concept art to include in our GDD.

I started this week working with the team on creating the functional flowboard. This was a very collaborative process. Since I am the director, I made sure we included every game state and menu interaction into the functional flowboard, and made sure the core game loop clarified what was the core loop and what was the smart depth. I also came up with all the concept sketches for the functional flowboard, environments, and the narrative flowboard, keeping everything consistent with the game's vision.

For the area concept sketches, I was focused on the rough colour schemes and environment details, painting the areas very quickly and not focusing on the finer details like texture.

I made these concept sketches to get a rough idea of how the player would look inside the game world, and to also give Matt a general direction to make the tileset for the actual implementation.

One final concept I came up with was the Ashen Statues, the objects within the game world that the game's abilities would rest on and be collected from.

This concept was inspired by the Metroid series, from their Chozo Statues. This was designed to be an homage to the series, as we are creating a Metroidvania of our own.

Next, I worked on finalizing the character implementation. Last week, I set up a basic hitbox that was active during each attack animation, but inactive during every other animation. I also set up a basic enemy template. This week I worked on actually having the hitboxes interact with the enemy and deal damage and knockback. I also wanted to implement a pogo jump for the player when using the down air attack, so that they wouldn't get hurt if they used the attack, and I also wanted to implement the basic fireball functionality.

I could have just made the hitbox system for the player, but I needed it to easily be added to other entities, particularly the boss, as well as other enemies that may need it. Therefore, I created a base hitbox class that can be read by a general Entity class that is applied to the player and all enemies. In the future, I might encapsulate the player and enemy classes within this entity class, but that refactoring can be done later. The hitbox reads a target tag, and if an entity with that tag enters the hitbox, they get dealt damage according to the source's damage.

Once damage and knockback were done, I started work on the pogo jump. This just required me to have the hitbox read by the attack state, and then set the player's velocity if the hitbox detected a target.

Finally, for the fireball, I just gave the fireball logic that went forwards at a constant velocity and dealt damage and knockback if it interacted with an enemy, just like how the hitbox worked. Then to cast it, I made the fireball a prefab and instantiated the prefab from the player. Because instantiating prefabs is a function of unity's MonoBehaviour, and none of my state scripts inherited from it, I had to create the firing function within the base player class, before calling it within the fireball state script. I made the firing function be triggered by an animation event trigger, so that I can control when the fireball is shot when the animation is implemented.

Fireball code, shooting it forwards based on player's direction and its own projectile speed.

Fireball instantiation code

Animation trigger code

With all of that done, the combat implementation, and core functionality of the player, was complete.

Overall, I did what I set out to do this week, and finished it on time. The requirements and deadline for the first playable build came out at the last minute this week, so I had to adjust the plans for both myself and the entire team, to make sure we could get out a first playable on time. This meant I had to push forward my plans to implement the boss fight, and focus on the timer/health, death, and upgrade mechanics so that we can have the basic core loop ready for the first playable and so that people can begin to test it. It wasn't the biggest deal, though it just confused my plans slightly, but I should be on track next week with the reorganized schedule.

Another issue I realized this week was that me and Nathan would have to merge our branches of the project, before each of us diverged too much that merging would break everything. Nathan handled the bulk of the merging, while I helped him reconfigure the parts that broke. We will have to do this again next week, but as we are working on separate parts, the merging should go smoothly again.

This week did not have many other issues with the team. Everyone did the work they were assigned and did it all at a good pace. Since we have a concrete plan for the first playable, this should also continue into the next week. With Thanksgiving coming up, we should all have a little extra time to work on our respective tasks, too.

Until next time.