Ryan's Personal Blog

​During week 1, we had a few meetings where we all came up with ideas and refined the details of the game. I made a couple contributions to the 1 and 5 pager, and also helped set up the GitHub repo for our prototype.

This week I looked into setting up multiplayer for our project. After trying a couple different methods, I found a good way to do LAN multiplayer with our current build (as in, both devices need to be connected to the same network). Currently, the host machine will always be the guard, and any connecting clients will be thieves, but this is only temporary. Next, I'd like to look into setting up connection with Unity's relay servers, so the LAN multiplayer can become true peer-to-peer (hosted on one player's PC, can connect across different networks)

This week, I mainly worked on turning the LAN multiplayer into true P2P multiplayer. It seems to work pretty well now, although we now need two machines to be able to test multiplayer, so I'd like to look into a way for us to test on the same machine again. Additionally, I made a very basic parameters menu for adjusting the guard and thief movement values. It's very barebones, so if we end up keeping this around for the future, I'll probably clean it up and make it more user friendly. Finally, I handled merging this week's PRs into a stable build for this week's playtest. Resolving merge conflicts in Unity scenes is absolute dogshit, so at some point I'd like to look into better ways to handle those conflicts, or avoid them altogether.

This week we made the strategic and carefully measured decision to rip out multiplayer completely in favor of a second-person singleplayer game. Aside from ironing out our new modified mechanics, I implemented a patrolling guard ai with line of sight, as well as a minimap that tracks their position and can be redirected. I also cleaned up the parameter menu and added some more params to it.

​This week I mainly worked on the new camera controls. I added the ability to click the cameras to view them fully, change the angle of the camera, and swap cameras. There’s also functionality for a camera breaking, but we couldn’t get it into the demo in time. The camera controls are definitely rough around the edges, mainly due to a lack of rotation limit, so that’s something I’d like to tackle sometime soon.

This week for me was mostly smaller additions and tweaks. My main change was adjusting the camera controls to be smoother with an actual delay. I also added in a second wandering guard and fixed a bug where pressing space sometimes activated UI buttons. Also, we have a web build of the game now! :0

This week I mainly worked on the new minimap to make it more clear and also usable. I also added hotkeys for the camera controls, as well as a dialogue manager to play voice lines at certain points ingame. I also expanded the guard's pathfinding to look inside rooms during the mini-sprint, which really really really sucked to do in like an hour and a half. Also I added picture-in-picture for the photo mode.

This week I mainly worked on adding the difficulty scaling randomization to the tile room, where difficulty modifiers can be added to the room, and higher difficulties will add more modifiers. I also added in the newly recorded dialogue and updated some of the dialogue triggers to flow better in the game.

This week was from hell. The major changes I worked on was adding a game difficulty selection to the title screen, adding basic randomization to the platformer rooms, seeding for the randomization, and a volume mixer. There were also other smaller additions and fixes, such as clarifying the minimap and adding sounds for hitting other tile types. Also, things kept breaking but luckily they were able to eventually become unbroken.