Ryan Crim_PPJs_wk07

Ryan Crim, Week 7 Journal

The focus this week was to try add and clean up some of the environment as well as integrate more of the art into the game.

The first thing I did this week was to work out some of the more annoying bugs that players were experiencing when playtesting the game last week. The one major bug consisted of the cart randomly jumping despite not being near a jump zone. After a short investigation, it was found that the check for the cart tag was accidentally removed, so when a product entered the zone it work make the cart jump. To fix this, I made sure to add back in the code to check for the tag. (0.25 hr)

Another bug involved the checkout and making sure that all products returned to it were properly added to the score and deleted. My implementation from the previous week resulted in some products getting caught and never being deleted/counted, and using John’s implementation resulted in some products not getting to the checkout pipe. Therefore, I combined my implementation that could get the products to the pipe with John’s that could properly delete and count all of the products, so that now it works as expected. (0.25 hr)

The last bug I fixed consisted of the cart not resetting its rotation when the game ends. This is not a noticeable problem when playing outside of the Drexel Ride, but it is not ideal for players to be looking at the end screen while the ride is still tilted at a strange angle. Therefore, I updated the cart script to slowly move back to having no rotation when the game ends. (0.25 hr)

Next, I focused on adding the secret button functionality to the gray box that was added last week. Specifically, I updated the button scripts I had created in prior weeks to be able to show and hide arrays of items so that pressing the button in the gray box would correctly hide all three secret walls. In addition, I reorganized the naming and group hierarchy of the game objects making up the gray box so that it would be less cluttered and easier for everyone working in the Unity project. (2.00 hrs)

With all of the planned environment fixes out of the way, I added a few of the product models the artists have created to the scene in their own aisles as shown in Figures 1 and 2. (0.50 hr)

Figure 1. Bread aisle

Figure 2. Water Bottle aisle

Also, feedback from playtesting last week showed there was some confusion at exactly what the checkout and jump spheres of light mean. In order to try to curb that confusion I created a semi-transparent arrow model to spin above the jump zones and a semi-transparent dollar sign to spin above the checkout zones as shown in Figures 3 and 4. (1.00 hr)

Figure 3. Floating, rotating arrow model above jump zone

Figure 4. Floating, rotating dollar sign model above checkout zone

In addition to working on the game, I updated the ‘Builds’ page of the website to contain a link to the most recent survey (that I created based on our existing survey and feedback we received on it) and a webplayer build of the most recent build to go with the existing link to download the zip file. (1.50 hrs)

Positives:

Fixed a couple of bugs that were causing real issues in the gameplay
Made improvements to gray box (added working secret button, floating icons for zones and modelled products)
Updated website and survey
Got three people to playtest the game (none on the Drexel Ride, though)

Negatives: