Devlog: Jack

Day 1: Our group decided we wanted to create a game in which you control a bullet where you have to assassinate a target. Using your skills to dodge and avoid obstacles and civilians. We also started to research our intended art style, target audience and game mechanics.

Day 2: Continued researching art style and game mechanics, helped team with creating moodboard, trello board, etc.

Day 3: Started programming the controls and movement system for the bullet. This consists of Pressing the spacebar to fire the bullet at a set speed and using the WASD keys to slowly rotate the pitch and yaw of the bullet to the intended direction. 

Day 4: Created a system that locks the camera towards the X axis no matter the current rotation of the bullet. Added NPC navmesh agents into the game, one of which will be the target. The target has a different tag compared to the rest of the NPCs and I have created a system in which if the bullet collides with the target, both the target NPC and bullet will despawn.

Day 5: We did some playtesting and found that it was too hard to predict the trajectory of the bullet because it was hard to determine the depth and angle of the bullet because the playtesters had pretty bad depth perception. Also some people complained that the bullet was too fast. After talking to my teammates I reworked the controls to only translate the bullet towards a certain direction instead of rotating towards it. This made the game easier for playtesters to play and predict where the bullet is going to hit. In regards to the bullet speed, slowing down the bullet makes it look weird and unrealistic, it also makes the bullet appear to be only slightly faster than the NPCs when they are moving. To solve this issue I made it so that after you fire the bullet with the spacebar, The game speed will be set to about 0.8, giving the player an illusion that everything is going in slow motion.

Day 6: I added a bullet drop system to the bullet to make it feel more realistic. I also started bug fixing issues regarding pausing the game while it is on slow motion mode and resuming resets it to regular speed, etc. Today I also started to implement some of the art assets my group members developed into the game.

Day 7: After consulting with my group, I started to develop some cool mechanics of each of the map levels. This included code to invert the controls, invert the camera, change the bullet to a different 3D model, change the visibility of the player camera, etc.

Day 8: Today I added in a system that destroys the bullet if you miss the target and hit a wall also when the bullet is destroyed, it will restart the level for the player while adding a counter to a missed shots variable. 

Day 9: I plugged in a simple UI to test if the missed shots and current level variables were displaying for the player. We also did some playtesting and changed the bullet speed and movement rates.

Day 10: I created a NPC movement system using Navmesh agents which makes NPCs randomly move around the game map at random. I also tagged one of the NPCs with a special tag to be the main target.

Day 11: I continued to refine and refactor the code of the NPC movement to be less buggy and more efficient because sometimes when you play the game, the NPC’s will fail to move and always be in an idle state. I also started 3D modelling and texturing some assets to be used in the game since the art part of the project is falling behind. 

Day 12: I continued 3D modelling and texturing the assets while importing extra assets into the project as soon as they became available. I also started to layout the design of the map as designed in our GDD. 

Day 13: I made animations for the trains that are going to be running past the platforms. These include variations that stop at the stations for a while and others that pass the station at full speed without stopping. 

Day 14: I got the rig and animations for the NPC and target from my group mates and I started to add them into the game. I created custom animation controllers for them, added the controller triggers into the NPC movement part of my code and parented under the NPC placeholder models I previously used.

Day 15: I added in the final art assets from my team which included the finalized UI, last minute 3D models and audio sources for the bullet, train, hit and firing sound effects.