Frankie Week 4 Devlog

For this week my main goal was to get the indicator to increase its scale as a visual indicator to the player that the charge is active. At the moment we are still using the placeholder arrow i found online, in the next few weeks it should be replaced with the intended arm sprite as the idea is the player (who is a robot) has a cannon type thing in the arm that launches them in the direction the arm is facing. Since I am working with the arrow I will set it up for it to scale with the charge of the jump.

I adjusted the existing code of the arrow and created a float for the scale and gave it values for what its scale would start as and what it would end if the player holds the charge to the capped time. The first two values I tried were initially way too big and covered most of the screen, it took a few more attempts of messing with values but eventually i settled on the scale at the start of the charge being 0.2 on xyz and at the end of the charge being 0.5 on the xyz, these sizes ended up being perfect for the game and I'm happy enough with how it ended up. I may need to adjust these values when the arm sprite is implemented but for the time being these work.

Afterwards I went to try and implement basic left and right movement that would be nothing more as a crawl to reposition the player, the idea would be since the player character doesnt have legs the crawl is extremely slow making it not viable outside of slight repositioning. However when I implemented the mechanic and tested it in unity, the jump was completely messed up because of it and would only go straight up instead of following the mouse position like intended. After a while troubleshooting and unable to fix the problem, I decided the best thing for the time being was to scrap the left and right movement for now and maybe come back to it later in development.

Lastly for this week I wanted to get the camera properly set up. The camera was completely static and I wanted it to track the player and follow along. I considered setting up cinemachine to make this work but before I did, I remembered that in a previous project of mine I had made a custom coded camera that would do exactly what I wanted. I searched through my github for that project, found the code and exported it into the new one. After getting the script attached to the default main camera and making it track the player I ran it in my small test level and it worked perfectly.

Overall fairly good week for development, I think this mostly wraps up the programming portion for the time being, I'm very satisfied with where the character currently is and I don't think much else is needed on the code side for the moment. I hope to try begin whiteboxing my portion of the level design next week since we will all be contributing to that.