3 Day Game Jam

In order to deal with some health issues, I decided to recruit a small temporary team and begin a 3-day Game Jam. Dale was previously working on a "flocking" mechanism to simulate groups of birds in flight. I felt as if that code would be perfect with the way the waypoint system. We decided to put the scripts together, in order to simultaneously work with a large number of AI with each ship possessing distinct features. Christian decided to join as a level designer, and in order to set up an actual design document. Txema agreed to make a bunch of new models to populate the hub. I didn't find it intuitive for the player to accept missions through a stale GUI. Instead, I wanted to set up a scene using a first-person-controller and have the player actually interact with NPC's, and possibly flesh out the story some more through that. Here is the initial task-list:

Our work was pretty cut out for us, but we were all feeling exceptionally motivated, wanting to present a finished level at the game showcase on Friday. I wasn't sure if I would be physically available for the presentation, so I fully intended on passing the project onto Txema and Dale.

Dale taking a selfie, with Christian creating a paper prototype of the race level.

Me, working hard (or hardly working) to adapt Dale's code.

I ran into some issues with Dale's code because each individual entity needed to procure it's own position before it began looking for the position of surrounding ships. This presented to be a problem when the parent object was destroyed. The solution that I came up with was to create an invisible flock controller than then controlled the children ships.

The parent was then attached to the original enemy movement script, and the player only saw the children ships flocking in formation.

I will update once again tomorrow after recreating Christian's paper prototype in Unity.