Riptide Override: Sprint 1

     The first sprint of seven has just concluded for Riptide Override. I was elected lead for this group and was quite fortunate that all other three members are "programmers", as this is where my skillset lacks in the most. That being said, movement scripts are something I am pretty decent at, so it's the first thing I started to work on for this project.

I started off by making the vertical movement system. This would end up being the only control the player would be able to interact with during the side scrolling portion of the game. I made it so the movement was fluid and would accelerate in the set direction until hitting a specific speed.

From there the next course of actions was horizontal movement. In the final game this would not be controlled by the player, and the character would move to the right at a set speed. For the sake of development and testing though, it has been binded to a key, so we can stop whenever we want to.

Alright, basic player movement is done for the most part now. Now I began work on the camera system, I knew this would be expanded on heavily by myself during the second sprint, so it was important that the system was independent and easy to upgrade. Because of this, the camera is not a child of the player, and runs separately on what I called the "CameraRig". This system uses similar but completely separate movement scripts from that of the player.

Once the movement system felt fluid enough, I started working on referencing for the puzzle aspect of the game. Being that we have a fourth member, specifically a programmer, the scope of this game could be made far larger than Bedtime Climb. We thought it would be fun to have two games in one. A action packed sides scroller, then a puzzle game in between those levels. Of lot of the work, I did this sprint was researching the premise of how viable this idea would be and finding reference from multiple other games to support it. For the side scrolling portion of the game, I was very lucky (as it has been removed from the App/Google Play store) to have the game Escape. Which represented a similar camera and movement system that I wanted to go for.

Regarding the puzzles, we weren't sure what we wanted at first. The original idea was to have a different puzzle type between every level. From wire matching, merging, pipe connecting, leak plugging, and a multitude of others. This sounded fun, and I found the references for a lot of these puzzles. I made the call though to scrap, or at least push back, the idea of having multiple types of puzzles as I figured it would divide our attention way too much. I chose to stick with the pipe rotating puzzle and told Tony to design the paper prototype around that type of puzzle specifically, choosing to ignore the entire side scrolling aspect of the game, as I felt a paper protype version of it would not provide sufficiently useful data. While the puzzle prototype would give us important statistics regarding balancing and player feedback.

Here are some of the different puzzle types that were originally planned:

We got the Github working near the end of the 2nd week of the sprint. Once I was able to acquire the player model from Tony, I created a quick loading scene that we would implement in-between levels, or on game launch.

I also worked on creating a far less demanding lighting system to use for mobile. This can be seen around the cockpit glass on the submarine. On Bedtime Climb we had some pretty crazy and somewhat unoptimized lighting mechanics, which was not a huge deal as the game ran on PC. for mobile though, it was a high priority to make sure everything was not demanding.

The majority of this sprint was spent on setting up the GitHub and Backlog. It was important that we got the infrastructure for the project done early, so we could start creating and sharing work. I can say that the time spent on that has already paid off, as I'm currently writing this halfway through sprint two, and have already created some incredibly complicated mechanics.