Week 16 Day 1 - What we did, and what we didn't - Beta 1

We just realized that it's been about 3 weeks since our last update (below the goal of at least 1 post per week).  Break was a bit less productive than we had hoped, partly due to other obligations, and partly due to the difficulty of models/animations with the player characters.  We were unable to finish any more abilities.

We've made quite a bit of headway recently, and also uncovered more issues we didn't realize we had.  The problems that are solved are crossed out below.

Issues we knew about:

Disconnecting from an unresponsive server takes too long

HUD will occasionally crash while respawning

Tab-score menu does not get drawn with consistency every frame

Gravity Toggle stops the player's momentum from their own movement (but not momentum from pushes and other abilities)

Slam ability (called Gravity Increase during alpha 2) does not properly throw surrounding players into the air

Blink ability requires that a player be standing completely still to activate

Detecting when a player is grounded is still inaccurate.

Players will on rare occasions be granted an extra jump when they leave the ground (because the game thinks they are still on the ground)

Players will appear to not be on the ground when going down small inclines 

Players can select resolutions from the Unity Game Menu that do not work with our interface

This options should really be moved to the settings menu 

There is no tooltip for what all of the abilities on the Game Lobby actually do.  Players are currently selecting abilities at random based on their names

Players can't edit their options from the game lobby

Issues we found out about:

• When a client gets a kill it doesn't always get counted
• Ground Slam will sometimes pop the caster into the air
• Area push should really be a sphere, rather than circle around the player
• HUD will have similar not-getting-drawn issues as the Tab-score

Animations

We were able to get a model and some basic animations in for players over break, however this took longer than expected, slowing progress on other aspects of the game.  We have a different walking animation for forward, backward, and strafing left and right.  There is also a single animation frame that is active while players are in the air.  There are almost no options for free animations, and we had to get some raw motion-capture data off the unity store for free, and make our own animations from the motion capture data.  You can see the blend of movement animations below:

Along the right side of the screeen, you can see the breakdown of where Unity will blend our animations.  Our individual animations can be partially blended together by unity automatically, we simply have to feed in values for the x/y of the 2D blend.  I set the red dot for the current mix of values at the top in the matrix, displaying the forward animation in the lower right.  In the center of the screen, you can see the entire blend tree with all of the attached animations, and sliders for the variables the blend is based on.

Player Weight

We also added weight to the players.  This currently is only effecting the movement speed of the players.  We will need to do some serious tweaking to the values to get weight to properly effect abilities in the expected manner.

Effect Handler

We are starting to realize that there are a large number of abilities and other things that are starting to effect certain stats on each player, like their movement speed, and their weight.  We are thinking of implementing an Effect Handler for each character, that would handle how long these effects last and ensuring they are properly organized and removed.

Preparations for Beta 1

In the final week before the Beta 1 test, we hope to add another ability or two, see if the weight can effect more than just the movement speed of players, and try to eliminate more items from the bug list from the top of this post.

Sign up for the Beta 1 test, this Sunday!

Week 12 Day 7 - Known Issues, and Preparations for Beta 1

The test this last weekend was very unhelpful.  Mostly in the sense that we didn't get any good information from the test, due to other issues with the game.  There were problems with maintaining a proper connection to the server, and the server handling users coming in and out.

We are aware of a number of bugs with the system currently, and they are as follows:

• Disconnecting from an unresponsive server takes too long
• HUD will occasionally crash while respawning
• Tab-score menu does not get drawn with consistency every frame
• Gravity Toggle stops the player's momentum from their own movement (but not momentum from pushes and other abilities)
• Slam ability (called Gravity Increase during alpha 2) does not properly throw surrounding players into the air
• Blink ability requires that a player be standing completely still to activate
• Detecting when a player is grounded is still inaccurate.
• Players will on rare occasions be granted an extra jump when they leave the ground (because the game thinks they are still on the ground)
• Players will appear to not be on the ground when going down small inclines
• Players can select resolutions from the Unity Game Menu that do not work with our interface
• This options should really be moved to the settings menu
• There is no tooltip for what all of the abilities on the Game Lobby actually do.  Players are currently selecting abilities at random based on their names
• Players can't edit their options from the game lobby

We've decided to alter the project schedule for the next test.  With spring break still going on during the time we intended for Beta 1, we are now pushing it back to the weekend of April 4-6.  We also are pushing back the scheduled goal for this week, due to the state of the game, and the issues listed above.

The schedule for the next several weeks is:

• Week 13 - Check as many items out of the above list as possible
• Week 14 - Implement more abilities, add player mass to the game
• Week 15 (spring break) - finish implementing abilities, add platform movement, possibly add models and clean up more from the checklist above.
• Week 16 - Polish for Beta 1, finish any work on models

Work on the project has certainly slowed in the previous weeks, in a frustrating fashion.  We hope to pick it up in the coming weeks, as we have some cleanup to do.

Week 11 Day 6 - Alpha 2 Test

Today we had our Alpha 2 test.  Things didn't go as we had planned.  Dias was basically unplayable.  The following were all issues that we discovered at the test.

• Players' HUDs would sometimes not load properly
• Sometimes players wouldn't respawn
• Boxes from the "Box Drop ability" were buffered when created, but not buffered when destroyed, resulting in dozens of boxes across some clients staying around.

As a result of these game-breaking bugs we had to end the testing period without getting the kind of feedback we wanted.  We may perform a small in-house test later, when we get these bugs fixed.

It is obvious that we have a lot of work yet to be done.  We will post again after we have talked about our goals we want to meet before our next test.

Week 9 Day 7 - GitHub Troubles & Abilities

This week we hit some problems with GitHub.  Zach commited his first change, and we were nearly unable to merge the commit.  It appears that Git doesn't do things nearly as simply when it hits conflicts in files.  We spent half of Saturday trying to get his changes into the system.  They are in there, but we are unsure exactly how we did it.  Our continued usage of GitHub is currently in question.  If we are going to have this much trouble with solving file conflicts, we may go back to SVN, as it worked quite simply there.

In less exciting news, the storing of teams was altered, to more easily accommodate grabbing the Team color or name.  Some odds and ends bugs were fixed with the display of the Score menu.  The side view camera is now implemented and working.  There is a known issue of the camera falling through objects when pointed straight up in the air (falling through platforms, we need to test if it still does this for other objects).  We'd also like the add the ability to swap the camera to the other side of the player dynamically in the game, now that it is no longer centered (This really shouldn't take more than an hour or two to accomplish).

We are down to 2 weeks before Alpha 2, and are getting a little bit behind on schedule.  We hoped to have 2 columns of abilities implemented by this coming test, however have not focused our efforts directly on those columns.  We will need to step it up this next week if we hope to have 2 columns completed in time.

The current ability chart is as follows:

	Light Role	Support (Builder) Role	Heavy Role
Attack-based Ability	Cone Push* (coned area)	Box Drop* (from sky)	Area Push* (area around player)
Defensive-based Ability	Blink* (Straight up)	Create Wall*	Steal Weight
Movement-based Ability	Roll (possibly ignore other abilities while rolling)	Grapple (like a grappling hook)	Ram (run forward and push other players out of the way)
Ultimate (and probably imbalanced) Ability	***	Destroy Platform	Ground Slam
Passive Ability	1/2 Dash Cooldown	Aura that lowers cooldowns for nearby players	Weight Gain

*These abilities are implemented currently
*** This ability is still in consideration.  We are trying out one of the following possibilities:

• Gravity Toggle - allows the player to not be effected by gravity while activated (Right now they can toggle this on and off, that will probably change)
• Rocket (fires a projectile rocket that applies a large force on the player it hits, or maybe an explosive force around the location it hits)

Week 8 Day 7 - Individual Scoring and Pre-Alpha 2

We spent the other day coming up with a system for individual scoring and awarding points to people who get "kills".  Every time a player gets hit by an ability, the caster of that ability is added to a list, along with a time stamp.  When a player dies, the last player to hit him is awarded a kill point.  Every other player in that list is awarded an assist point.  Players in the list with a time-stamp within the last five seconds are only awarded points.  We are also keeping track of the amount of times players die, so that any player can review his/her performance after every game.

We have implemented a few abilities but most still haven't been worked on.  We are still discussing if we are going to change some of the abilities from the previous table we posted.

We still need to work on changing the camera from a top perspective to a side perspective, along with a follow camera while someone is waiting to respawn.

Week 7 Day 4 - Odds, Ends and Abilities

Today we nailed down a complete list of abilities.  Obviously this will change as we try new abilities out, but we want to get as many of these implemented as possibly by Alpha 2, or at least 2 columns of abilities.

	Light Role	Support (Builder) Role	Heavy Role
Attack-based Ability	Push (coned area)	Box Drop (from sky)	Push/Slam (area around player)
Defensive-based Ability	Blink (Straight up)	Create Wall	Steal Weight
Movement-based Ability	Roll (possibly ignore other abilities while rolling)	Grapple (like a grappling hook)	Ram (run forward and push other players out of the way)
Ultimate (and probably imbalanced) Ability	Rocket (large force on player it hits)	Destroy Platform	Ground Slam
Passive Ability	1/2 Dash Cooldown	Aura that lowers cooldowns for nearby players	Weight Gain

From the previous list of TODOs, we have completed the following:

• Pinging system that disconnects clients when they lose connection with the server
• The last player that 'dies' at the end of a game is properly destroyed when the game is over
• The mouse is now 'locked' to the window while controlling the character
• Solves the issue on Linux with the mouse escaping the edge of the window
• Solves the issue on Mac with opening the top OS menu when aiming upwards
• Characters now are instantly 'teleported' to the location they respawn to, rather than being pushed to that location

Minus the items that are directly linked to abilities, here are our remaining goals for Alpha 2:

• Hit detection
• Character-based scoring, rather than just Team-based
• Moving the camera to aim from the sides of the characters, rather than from the top.

As a final note, work was started on the Box Drop ability under the Support Role, however we are considering doing the Light and Heavy abilities as the 2 columns.  The reasoning for this is that those 2 roles are more easily understood to inexperienced testers.  It would also give a better idea for what to expect from the choosing of abilities for all other users.

Week 6 Day 2 - Character Movement, Cone Push and Alpha 2 Prep

On Saturday, we had our first test, Alpha 1.  We had 10 players participating (Big thanks to all of you!), and got a lot of great information out of it.  Also the post-play questionnaires brought up some good points.  A few we already were aware of, in particular:

• Players couldn't be pushed if they moved
• Over the head viewpoint tends to cause pushes to be down into the platforms, and not be as useful
• Jump counter could be reset by any kind of contact with objects, not just your feet hitting the ground

We also had a server disconnect during the second game, and all clients thought they were still in the game.  Right now we are relying on Unity to call the correct functions when this disconnect happens.  Obviously that isn't enough, so we are considering inserting our own pinging method.  The idea would involve each client pinging the server for a connection, and if they didn't receive a response within a second or two, to automatically disconnect themselves.

We already completed a couple of things on our list of tasks for Alpha 2:

• Characters can now be pushed while moving
• We are moving the rigidbodies of players in a new way, which has a new issue in that their velocities are not effected by it, however pushes work as expected now.
• This new method also feels much smoother than changing the velocity
• The chatbox in the lobby and game was broken during the test, and has been repaired
• We forgot to update how we are sending players now, since that update in the last week before the test
• Duplicate names now have a number appended to them, which increments until it finds an open possible name

We've started the list for Alpha 2 goals, which will undoubtedly be modified in the coming days:

• Design abilities
• Implement abilites (Why is this one item?!)
• Game Lobby Character Creation
• HUD
• Handle Server Disconnect
• Respawning at game end
• Follow camera while respawning
• This is optional really, we are debating whether we even want this, as an overhead camera is fine
• Hit detection
• Proper scoring for players and not just teams
• More thorough testing on mouse input
• One of the testers reported issues when looking down while turning
• Try aiming camera from the side of the player, rather than from the top
• pushes will be generally aimed downward with the top camera, making the pushes less effective
• Characters currently lerp to their respawn location from where they hit the boundary, they should simply be teleported

The plan is to hit a few of these odds and ends issues from the test for the remainder of the week, while also beginning to draw out what all the abilities are going to be.  We hope to have a ready list of abilities by next week.  The 2 weeks after that will be spend implementing as many abilities as possible.  The remaining 2 weeks will be spend cleaning up the other systems before the Alpha 2 test.