Grapple Gliders - Sprint 2

The sprint this time felt a lot more difficult. I definitely wanted to take a smaller amount since I was going to participate in the 24 HOURS animation jam and I needed to begin the breakout project in 280. After all, I spent most of my homework time in the first sprint actually working on the prototype. Mainly what I did this sprint was adding in Player UI and beginning to make enemies. The UI was pretty simple, but of course, enemies were a lot more difficult. 

For the UI, all I did was add in score, lives and a clock that told the player how much time elapsed. These were pretty simple and it literally took about 20 minutes. For the clock I basically googled how to make it display in minutes and seconds instead of just seconds. I’m glad that was really easy as I definitely didn’t want to spend time on that. At the moment, there’s no way to actually gain score points yet since I haven’t finished working on the enemy and the lead hasn’t worked on a way to defeat them.

For enemies, I first began with the homing enemy. The homing enemy would move along the x axis between a range of values, and if the player came into the view of the enemy, it would start going towards it.



I am still not a very good coder, so I went with using a box collider for the enemy’s field of vision. That would turn out to not be that great as then I got really confused as to how I’d differentiate between the field of view collider and the hitbox collider (for dealing damage to the player). Although for this sprint, I was only able to finish up movement. For the next sprint I would work on getting it to hurt the player.
I also began a bit of work on a shooting cannon enemy as well (it wasn’t on the presentation because it didn’t work correctly yet). I still definitely have a lot of trouble getting that to work since it’s not shooting in the way that I’d like it to. I was using a different script to control the bullet’s active time, but a tutor suggested to me that it’d be better to keep it all on one script. At first, it was shooting a ton of bullets in a sphere around the cannon. I realized that that would be really good for the goal post, since the plan the designer wanted for the goal post was to have a lot of lights shine to indicate the goal post.

But unfortunately, that’s not what I’m looking for right now. For some reason I just couldn’t get the cannon to shoot the player in the way that I wanted. At one point it actually pointed at the player but for some reason it was wobbly and not just straight.

With the addition of points to the Trello board, our team realized that just saying “we need enemies” on the card was too vague so we had to change that up after the sprint was over. I think with the work I did, I should have probably written something like “As a player, I need the homing enemy to move” for what I did this sprint and “As a player, I would like the homing enemy to be able to hurt me.” for what I would do next sprint. For now, I’m getting them to be able to hurt the player.

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