Devlog 2 Postmortem 

Successes: 

We were able to get the character to move in a 3d world using a virtual joystick rather quickly. After a long trial and error process, we were able to grab the inputs of the joystick. After updating the character model to be unity chan, we were also able to get her moving with the joystick. Also, we successfully wrote a universal spawner that could generate different types of cars randomly, and we are able to select the direction and prefabs of the vehicles. Lastly, we made use of various assets to decorate our scenes, making them more visually appealing. 

Some challenges:

Working on getting the animator to face the direction where the joystick was point proved to be a challenge, We tried grabbing the animator, and found out it didn’t have a transform that we could grab, so we tried to change the vector3 into a quaternion which didn’t work out. We finally realized we could have just grabbed the transform of the entire object and were able to change the direction it faced.

Object collision worked well, but we had a problem trying to animate the character to be blown away when colliding with the moving obstacles. We also don’t have collisions on the buildings and other non-moving objects. 

The play seems to have some sort of delay on the transitions between running and idle state because of the length of the states.

Also, there seem to be some small bugs in the timer system, which might confuse players.

What We Learned:

Using a virtual joystick to control player movement was a bit tricky. If we wanted a constant speed in all directions we needed to grab the input and then create a normalized vector before multiplying it by the velocity, otherwise, if we just input the horizontal and vertical components into the vector it would have different results.

Also, the effect of some bugs could be devastating. Forgetting to remove rigidbody from some vehicles could result in a huge mess: all vehicles run out of control and bump into each other.

Future Work: 

• Bug fixes: Fixing timer bug in the game; Fixing the animation problem on the character.
• User Experience: Create more levels; Add object collision on the stationary obstacles to increase the level of difficulty; Improve the appearance of the virtual joystick interface.
• We can add more collectibles and establish a scoring system: the goal is not only to reach the finish line in 10 minutes. Players will also need to get as many scores as possible.
• Interaction: We can allow users to play against their friends but creating a scoreboard and other incentives to make users invite their friends to play our game.