Week 8 - Player Movement

Introduction

The first week of development for most of the time I was actually away due to a trip I’d booked before I enrolled in Uni so that definitely set me back a little bit. I would have hoped to have had more done in the first week especially since my goal is to really polish especially the movement of the player which for me is the cannon.

Progress:

Once I got back, the first thing I did was boot up Unity and start out with a very crude prototype of the cannon based on some generic square sprites and circle sprites for the cannonball and write a small bit of code that enabled me to shoot the cannonball by instantiating it and also move the cannon on a full 90 degree angle.

It was quite important to me especially based on the game I’m basing a lot of this on Cannonball Follies, that I get the angles and the steps for the cannon’s range of movement right.  The focus here is repeatability and finding the right angle to get the right result for the puzzle, so I went about implementing 20-point steps between 0 degrees and 90 degrees so that the repeatability is in the gameplay as early as possible.

The basic controls were just left and right on the keypad to change the angle of the cannon and space bar for firing the cannon.

Issues:

The main challenge that I started to face was the sprite didn’t have the pivot point correctly for the rotation of the cannon which I could foresee as an issue that was going to affect me later dealing with the actual sprites I use. When researching how to do that the solution was to do with the pivot point on the sprite and using a basic shape from unity was not able to change the pivot point effectively. I noted that as the next step for me by getting some sprite assets, focusing on implementing that next week.

Feedback / Testing:

Returning home late in the week led me to miss the opportunity to test my game in the practicals so that didn’t give me any feedback but at this point. I think next week once I’ve worked on fixing the pivot and worked more on the controls will be more beneficial for me and I’ll get some feedback on the movement then as well.

Future Improvements and Ideas:

I want to next week try to implement a very basic UI of the power of the cannon which I already have in code but I don’t have in UI or changeable by the player yet. I would also like to add the sprites for the cannon and the cannonball and possibly also play around with some backgrounds. Not sure necessarily if I’m going to make the effort to make something finalish yet, I will see.