Stay on Beat - Week 2→3 Recap

Where we left off…

Last week we left off completing the following goals- and creating a pretty buggy demo. This week is all about fixing those last bugs and creating a demo.

So let’s look at the goals for this week in more detail

Cool! With that in mind let’s see what actually happened

Finding the Beat

Last week we had a build with a pretty crazy bug that made the ghosts freak out and come at the player unexpectedly fast. Luckily after a not insignificant amount of time, my Deep CS Knowledge™ came in handy.

private Transform initialPosition; //Holds where we started
public GameObject hitPoint; //Holds where we want to go
//...
void Start() {
	initialPosition = transform; //Set the initialPosition at the start
	//...
}
void Update(){
	//... yada yada logic that runs this
	//... when it needs to
 
		//Move between where we started and where we're going
		transform.position = Vector3.Lerp(initialPosition.postion,
																			hitPoint.transform.position,
																			time/timeUntilHitpointMs //<- this works
																			);
}

GhostController.cs Buggy Version

Can you find out what’s wrong? All the info you need is in that code block. Once you’re done, read on for what’s wrong and the “fixed” code.

Solution to the 👻 Problem

private Vector3 initialPosition; //Holds where we started, now as Vec3
public GameObject hitPoint; //Holds where we want to go
//...
void Start() {
	//This time we do a 100% no doubt deep copy!
	initialPosition = new Vector3(transform.position.x,
																transform.position.y,
																transform.position.z);
 
	//...
}
//This is mostly the same now- but uses Vec3 directly V
void Update(){
	//... yada yada logic that runs this
	//... when it needs to
 
		//Move between where we started and where we're going
		transform.position = Vector3.Lerp(initialPosition,
																			hitPoint.transform.position,
																			time/timeUntilHitpointMs //<- this works
																			);
}

So!

Remember shallow vs deep copies? Or in other words, reference copy vs value copy? Well turns out that’s what was happening, and instead of a nice linear interpolation, it became exponential. This is because initialPosition was just a direct reference to the ghost’s position! And so instead of the intended behaviour (going smoothly from A to B), we got the exponential (or logarhythmic) behavior of going really fast to really close to the point, and then very slowly (imperceptibly slow) to the end.

More work…

Next once it was fixed I started adding and improving the systems. Here’s what we started with from last week, and a comparison of some of the initial progress this week

← Last Week ☝️ This Week

So as you can see the biggest features are better visual indicators and a scoring system! However… the text popups aren’t the best indicator of progress, so that would be my next steps. Something else to note aside from the bug fixes is that I went through some iterating on the architecture- rather than changing color we now can change Prefabs for example. Just some improvements as I add support for important detailing/feel development which should be done in just a few weeks. A good system now means hours saved later!

Well, another dev session goes by and we are so close to a playable demo. We’ve added new lighting, a skybox, more theming, clearer texts, and a prototype score display! This should be enough for a “feel” prototype and in fact, I’ve gotten some feedback from Danny Rankin on an earlier version of the above video (pre-graphics stuff). Most of the feedback was just on improving the feel and connecting more with the physical interaction- we’ve had a bit of brainstorming and you’ll see that I’ve tweaked the camera angles and a few other things- starting to work on “feel” more than just “can I hit ghost”

The biggest things missing from a released demo to my friends and other interested parties… is just really the music, ironically. I built the music system in another project last semester, so its finally time to bring that in. I was planning to have that done this week but ran into some roadblocks, mostly as I had some time dedicated to this capstone sapped away by a day spent applying for Apple. So its a bit of catchup here to get the demo in more hands but at least I’ve had some feedback to work off of anyways.

Recap-

Honestly I made some good progress from last week, even if on the surface its not too apparent from the videos (again a lot of the systems were expanded behind the scenes, to make stuff like animations or FX much easier to implement- before it was just hacked together to quickly tell me if something worked or not).

However I did miss a bit of the coursework assignments, and am definitely behind on finding a mentor at this point that isn’t named Danny Rankin. By next week I’ll be looking to have a playable music demo with tracks and begin replacing default assets. I’ll also look forward to changing the animation (from the up/down “punching”) to one that more closely resembles Abby’s progress and control (and maybe we can start integrating that too?)

-m

halmic.co