CAGD 377 - Blog Post 3 - 10/13/2024

    During this sprint I worked on a few things, the one that gave me the most trouble was getting the blocks to have a visual when they move. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to get the blocks to have some animation when they move so the player knows which way they are driving. I tried all sorts of different ways but could not figure it out. So, after many failed attempts to get an animation for it I asked my team if they wanted to be able to see them move or if it was okay for me to just put a trail renderer on the objects. My team did say that for now there can be a trail renderer on them but in the future, they would like me to revisit the idea of being able to see the objects move. 

    Something else that I did during the sprint was making the code work to where we can just add as many zombie types to the game as possible, all that needs to be done in the inspector is add in a number and then give that number a color for the square then it is all set. This needed to be done because when the first build was made, I accidentally only had it go to 64 and then when the player would try to merge two 64 blocks the game would then crash. So, I changed how it looks in the code and added more numbers so the player can play for much longer without crashing the game.

    Another thing that was done this sprint was adding in some sort of visual effect for the blocks, so you know when you have merged them. While I was doing it also added the visual effect to all the new blocks that would spawn in, and I was trying to remove it so it would only play on the merge blocks and not the spawn-in blocks, but I was unable to get that to work because of how merging and spawning work. So, I asked my team if they would like me to remove it off of the new blocks that spawn in or if they would like to keep that in the game as well. They ended up liking the idea that they also have an effect when they spawn so the player knows all of the blocks that spawned and merged on the board instead of just the merged blocks.

    At the end of the sprint, I had to build the game and send it to the producer to upload to Google Play so we could have play testers on hardware instead of just software. The game took longer to build than I thought but I was still able to get it to my producer at a reasonable time and then give him enough time to then upload it to Google Play at a reasonable hour. Then towards the end of the sprint after some of the adjustments had been made, I sent a second build to the producer to have him upload just to see what it all looked like on hardware. It's been important to me to have our newest version on hardware as soon as possible because when I am testing in Unity it is very slow and it looks like it isn't smooth, but when it was uploaded to Google Play for the first time, I noticed that the game is smooth on hardware. Now that we have the core gameplay done next sprint, I will be trying to get our attack system up and running as that is our plus one to the core gameplay of 2048.