Week 4 Meridian

This week our goal was to create a working bare bones prototype. I talked to the lead to tell them about what needed to be in the game and we discussed and set out tasks. I was tasked with creating the enemy movement and shooting.

I used playmaker and I was started to understand it a bit better as I was able to create an enemy that moves toward the player. I did this by create a fsm called movement and inside that fsm I created a state called move what had a player move to action which made the enemy move to a target object which was the player at first that's all it did so i added a finish event to it so that after the enemy moved to the player it would finish and move to the next state which was looking for player which was empty it was just their to reset the move towards as I had figured out that after it moves to the player once the action is completed so this was a way to get around that. However the game came up with a an error saying that the states were looping too fast so i figured out that if i put a wait which is a timer for 0.1 seconds it the game worked when I pressed play. Now the every 0.1 second the enemy was looking for the player and if the enemy wasn't next to the player the enemy would move towards the player.

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to create a shooting mechanic for the enemy so I was left with an enemy that could move towards the player for this week. I updated the GitHub so that my classmates could see it and so the other designer working on the same branch as me James T knows that he needs to update his GitHub and can now use the basic enemy if he needs. Also because he's design lead it allows him to check my progress.

We reviewed our work and realised that we where not where we needed to be and that I talked with my classmates we decided that it was best if we focus on getting a base prototype so our sprint this week was to continue towards getting a bare bones game.

Reflection

If I had better set personal deadlines for myself I might have been able to figure out how to get a working shooting mechanic. I also should have put up a better system to check up on everyone progress apart from me just texting everyone on discord. I was also too focus on my task and I was moving like a designer and not a lead this week. Some good news is that Sunday meetings are working really well and helping to make sure everyone knows their tasks. I was upset about not having a prototype ready for this week so that we could at least play test and start balancing.