Week 3 (10.2 - 10.8)

We've continued to experiment with procedural, lizard-like movement. The main challenge was getting it to feel smooth and natural, almost like how an actual axolotl would move. I think we're almost there.

Another hurdle was collision. Part of how Skippy moves is that his head looks at an invisible aim sphere in the game. Initially this sphere was a rigidbody that the player controls with physics, and it worked okay, but it would collide with objects before Skippy's model did, which would make it look like he gets stuck in front of walls. The solution to this was to make the player control a capsule centred at Skippy's mesh and make Skippy follow it, and to have a sphere as a child of this capsule, positioned at the forward end of it. Skippy's head would still look at this sphere, but the collision would be more accurate.

This lets us customize how exactly Skippy follows the capsule, in particular we lerp it with some damping value to customize smoothness. Essentially this makes Skippy trail behind the capsule, and especially behind the aim sphere. We wanted this effect because when the player changes movement direction, the aim sphere would be to the left/right of Skippy, making him turn his head in the direction he's turning.

As per the guests' suggestions two weeks ago, we have added checkpoints that allow the players to respawn at that location. So far we only have 1 checkpoint, however, it will be more difficult to implement multiple checkpoints as we have to choose to either prioritize the furthest checkpoint or the most recent checkpoint that the player reached to be the respawn location.

We have also introduced power-ups seeing how it was a great hit with the audience and guests in our pitch. So far we have implemented speed-up and double-jump as Skippy takes a dive in Monster or Redbull (we're thinking of a name for these drinks) respectively. We are looking to include 1 or 2 more power-ups, not too many so the player is not overwhelmed. 

As for level design and mechanics, we started working on a prototype of Level 1, and we added the functionality to his tail attack. Objects can either break or fall down when attacked.

It was also time to reorganize and prefabify the tutorial level's structure in the explorer hierarchy. It also turned out that a lot of our movement code was too frame-rate dependent, and that made Skippy move a lot slower on lower-end PCs. So we split the physics portion and input handling into the FixedUpdate and Update functions respectively.

Finally, we tried to add controller support. It works fine for Xbox, but breaks with PlayStation controllers for some reason. We're looking into that.