Week 4

PROGRAMMING:

This week's focus in programming was the UI and the swinging bar. The work on UI is not yet finished, however the swing bar is already implemented. To implement the swing bar, we first worked out how we want the swing bar to work. We wanted a swing bar to be a more advanced way of traversal than the vents. One way it could be more advanced would be the ability to traverse between buildings without having to jump down to the ground (whereas the vents would be for in-building traversal). We also decided that for the simplicity of level design, the swing would be two-dimensional in a sense. The swing would have an area where it is available, the swing would also have two starting points (which are also end points), if the swing is available to the player, and the player has a grappling hook, the player will be teleported to the nearest starting point (which should not be far away) and will swing in a curved motion to another building. To implement this we made it a 2D problem and workout out a formula for a parabola with two known points and a known depth. Then we simply called the lerp function to traverse between two points, but overwritten the y with the values calculated with our formulas. This allowed for a great degree of customisation in the editor.

The points can be moved around:

The curve can also be modified:

And the swing can be rotated around the y if needed:

LEVEL DESIGN:

The main objective for level design was to create a functional vertical slice of the game that would display a lot of the gameplay in a short period of time. To do this first paper drawings of the level were created. Those include the scheme of the tutorial level:

The overall idea:

And the outdoors outline:

Those areas were then implemented into Unity and tested with a small group of 3 individuals. The testing results were rather positive.