John's Personal Blog

I prioritized working on the demo itself. I set up two basic movement scripts. One allows the guard to pan across cameras without moving, with protection against panning too high or low (so that yaw isn't messed up,) and the other allows the player to move about in second person without relying on camera angles, by using left and right movement controls to turn. I also set up camera render targets for the guard's monitors, which was surprisingly trivial. Orienting oneself and moving around from this second-person perspective was surprisingly fun.

I set up a system for camera freezing this week, using ray tracing to detect a monitor and freeze its corresponding camera for 5 seconds. The real thing will be much longer, as it will effectively be the thief's timer to get through the room (or to a safe spot so the guard can freeze it again,) but 5 seconds makes it easy to demonstrate.

Freezing is accomplished by simply disabling and re-enabling the camera, nothing too complex. I also did a performance test, increasing the number of cameras, render targets, and monitor displays from 4 to 15, as there is a potential concern from having that many cameras rendering on a scene at once. Surprisingly, there was no noticeable performance hit, even though I was running it in the editor and streaming it through Discord at the same time. That tells me that we won't have to worry too much about having too many rooms on a scene, but if it gets bad anyways, we can always turn off cameras the guard isn't looking at. 

This week, in addition to participating in our LARP playtest, I replaced the guard's camera freezing interaction with arbitrary button-pushing, targeting camera freeze buttons instead of just the monitors, with room for future expansions, such as a number pad for the guard to use to shut down surprise traps.

This week was fun. We decided on Friday that singleplayer would be better for the game going forwards, which meant spending Friday and Saturday working on rapidly completing the build in time for the playtest. It went surprisingly well, since we were ultimately just recombining two halves of what was initially a single controller, but at the same time it fixed our issue of not having enough for each player to do. It was hectic, but it was also kinda fun. I'm satisfied with the way it turned out.

This week was much more relaxed than that last minute pivot earlier. It turns out a disabled game object can still be called, which is how I got the robot's photo button to only take a picture when you click it. This photo function is also how you spot traps now, which in lore is because the robot has advanced scanners that the mansion's security cameras do not. I then made an exit door that gives a friendlier win screen (fixing the bug where switching scenes would always take you to the lose screen,) and since I had extra time on my hands, added a few more fixes and tweaks.

I feel like I'm getting into a good rhythm here, completing my changes early on Saturday so I can help with reviewing and merging other PRs, and then making an additional patch with a few tweaks afterwards. The biggest change I made this week was making it so damage swaps two of your controls instead of being an instant kill, which I thought was a pretty fun challenge to play with. It also makes the game more forgiving while feeling like it's less forgiving.

This week, instead of just having one long sprint, we had a mini-sprint on Monday, followed by the rest of the sprint in the rest of the week. I worked on expanding the trap system from before. Now, instead of always zapping the robot's controls, traps can come in two stackable flavors. One alerts the guard, using what Ryan did in the mini-sprint, and the other zaps the controls. They're color coded as well, red and blue respectively, and magenta traps do both. Also, to make a bit of room after your controls get zapped, hitting a trap will disable it, so jumping in place won't zap you again.

I didn't have much time this week, but I got to add two significant changes. There are now green tiles that apply random camera shaders (which I think are quite fun even though they can be annoying,) and guards now have better detection: they raycast to not spot you from behind a wall, and extra hitboxes were added to make them a bit harder to sneak past. All these changes also took longer than expected, but that's to be expected.

This was the final rush, but I somehow managed to get a lighter load than normal, or at least it felt like it because it was split between two milestones. I modified the green tiles to also apply shaders to the robot's camera sometimes, and made it so blue tiles can tilt said camera on all three axes. I also added in the third relic type and made it so all trap tiles apply a 0.2 second stun - now you can't just plow through effortlessly.