The Eighth Week

Monday was my birthday. I went to the studio early, feeling quite unhappy, and started making a Unity project for the vertical slice of the wind area’s interaction. This meant spending some time copying over the necessary parts of old scripts, which was pretty tedious. George and Josh also gave me some presents and a card when they came in, which I very much appreciated. After a while, we all spoke as a team, with George saying about our goals to get most of the work for three of the environments out of the way before the Easter break. We discussed our need for more social media presence, setting certain days of the week for us each to be uploading images or videos on (in the order of Ella, Bernie, George and then me). We then spoke about our plans for the coming weeks’ work, and I was told to focus on getting everything sorted for the wind mechanic and implementation over this week, then the basic string mechanic implementation, and then the mechanic and implementation for the brass area.

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The Seventh Week

After feeling incredibly depressed on Sunday night, I stayed up all night to work on my Reflective Journal submission. When I went to the studio early (as usual) on Monday morning, I simply continued with Reflective Journal until I handed it in fairly late in the afternoon (soon before the deadline). Exhausted, I headed home, and after drifting off multiple times in my chair before and after dinner (and getting a headache), I decided it’d be best to get to bed very early. This meant that I got no more work done that day.

The Sixth Week

This week was mostly dedicated to working on the Reflective Journal 3 module, so don’t expect much in the way of project progress. I began the week on Monday morning by heading to the studio, as per usual. After doing some research Reflective Journal for a while, I started feeling unhappy and struggled to get anything done for some time. I was helped out of this mood in the afternoon (which was very much appreciated), and continued with the Reflective Journal work. After some time, though, I was once again incapable of getting anything done for a while. After I headed home in the evening, I continued working on Reflective Journal until I went to bed.

The Fifth Week

I began the week on Monday with the usual trip to the studio, eventually continuing to work on the wave mechanic prototype. I first added a Canvas Group component to the score circle objects to set their alpha value to zero, so that I could see the prototype without the score being visibly tracked. I then opened Ella’s key art for the game in Photoshop, so that I could find the RGB values of the different characters’ main colours and use those of the player character and the brass character to define the initial colours of the two lines. I then calculated the midpoint of the two RBG values, hoping for the two colours to gradually merge into that colour, but it looked pretty disgusting. Therefore, I asked Ella to pick a better green on my laptop and sent an image of the colour to myself over Slack, so that I could check it on my (properly calibrated) phone screen. Being satisfied, I set this as the target colour for merger.

The Fourth Week

On Monday morning, I began the week at the studio, where (after a while) I copied a few scripts over to a new Unity project for prototyping the new version of the movement, removing unnecessary sections of the code. I then continued working on the script for the new movement, generally referring to how I was doing things with the old version and considering the differences I’d need to account for. Then, in the afternoon, George sent me a Unity package that contained the scene for the brass civilisation, as well as all of the necessary assets. When I imported it into the project I’d made (with all of the game objects placed with the same properties as the older movement prototypes), it imported a blank scene with the same name as the scene I was working with, overwriting it and completely clearing a chunk of my work. In future, I’ll have to be sure to immediately rename any scenes I’m working with if I’m to be importing or exporting any packages. Not only did it clear the scene I’d been working with, but the new scene that George intended on giving me had inconsistencies with its source version, with the bounce lighting in the wrong place and all of the colliders in the scene moved to blank, unnamed game objects with reset transform values, separate from the objects they’re meant for. This meant that none of the mesh colliders were even assigned meshes, and I couldn’t really locate what the colliders were meant for due to the reset transform values. Basically, everything was wrong, but I at least didn’t lose the scripts I’d been working on (as they weren’t overwritten).

The Third Week

As I finished last week’s blog post with Monday’s happenings, this week began on Tuesday morning, with an early start at the studio (as per usual). At the studio, I continued working on the mathematical version of Bernie’s mechanical prototype, first making it so that the wave’s main counter resets when it reaches the end of the total length of the wave, rather than a screen afterwards (a change that I realised I had to make while writing last week’s post). After this, I briefly tried to make it so that the displayed wavelength could be changed separately from individual wavelengths, but the offsets of the different parts of the test wave were making it so that I couldn’t have a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Eventually, however, I put the sine waves from the test wave into the Desmos Graphing Calculator and tweaked some values, and realised that I was able to change the wavelengths by globally changing the x coefficients (as I’d wanted) as long as all of the x offsets were positive, so I changed the negative offsets in my code to positive ones. From here, I copied the wave values I had into a new wave, making all of the wavelengths equally shorter, and saw that it worked perfectly well. Therefore, I added the wave size variable that I’d initially intended on implementing (to determine how much of the wave is visible on-screen at once), and accounted for it in all of the necessary calculations. However, I realised that I was dividing by it in places where I should have been multiplying by it, and after fixing this, it worked as intended. I also thought that it’d make sense for the wave size variable to also adapt the wave’s increase speed, so that it moved at the same rate regardless of how much of it’s visible, so I added this functionality in.

The Second Week

I finished last week’s blog post on Monday evening, and covered Monday’s work there, so this week’s post starts with Tuesday. After getting to the studio early, I imported the new version of the wave model that Bernie gave me, as well as the audio track to go with the wave. I had to substantially scale-up the model (to match its vertical scale with the older wave model), and I switched out the material for the wave, such that it was a solid white. I also changed the material for half of the panels that marked a second’s worth of wave behind it, since I couldn’t see the panel against the black background of the scene, though I realised that this was actually because of the direction in which it was facing, and I reverted the change I’d made. Once I’d imported things properly, I decided it’d be best to separate the two versions of the prototype, so I copied everything over to a new scene in Unity and lined-up the new wave with the old ones, before removing all unnecessary game objects from the new scene. Then, I made a new version of the wave management script, with everything copied and then the unnecessary sections of code (concerning switching between which ball and wave models to show) removed, as well as the setting of variable values at the start of the script, so that they can be fully determined in the Inspector.

The First Week

I began the week, and the second semester, on Monday morning by heading to the studio (though I had to wait until it was unlocked, so I couldn’t have as early a start as usual). I started my working by copying the necessary scripts from the first semester’s Unity prototype to a new project, so that I could keep the work separate and a bit more tidy. I then removed sections of the scripts’ code that were quoted-out or erroneous (due to the removal of unnecessary scripts), as well as any references to abandoned camera systems (as we’d settled on an isometric one, and the system for it was already in-place). All of this was a bit tedious, but I’d say it was necessary.