11/20/2025
Sprint 6 Kickoff
For this sprint I focused on a couple of things that I needed to definitely take care of since last time. One of the main crucial ones was getting our animations to play properly with our character model of the player since I could not get them to work for our build last time. My other tasks involved fixing bugs heavily that appear to break core features and mechanics of our game that would cause our players to get frustrated and not enjoy our game. We learned all of this through our team's most recent playtest feedback we had received from our last prototype build.
So, like I explained I first started by reimporting our model that came from our FBX files that had the animations attached so that I could now use the model that had the appropriate rig and skeleton attached to it. Once I did this I went ahead and reattached all of the important components to that model's inspector window in order to match our old player game object. After I did that, I made sure to attach my animator controller as well as my respective player scripts and I gave it a shot. As soon as I did that it worked perfectly and I marked this card as complete.
The next thing I immediately worked on was updating all of our speed variables across the board. These included player movement, animations and ability timers. It became clear to us during our playtest feedback that players thought the movement for our game felt too slow and buggy, so I wanted to address that almost immediately. All I really did for this was go into both of my player scripts and update all the float values I had declared for speeds. Player speed went from 5 to 8, Animation speed from 1 to 1.75 and another important one was sun pillar charging that went from 5 seconds to now only 3 seconds to charge. These would all now reflect faster speeds that would make our game feel much smoother.
The last and perhaps most challenging thing I worked on was bug fixing. There were quite a few bugs that were still lingering around in our latest electronic prototype and that were brought to our attention during the feedback. There were at least 3 big noticeable bugs but one of them was by far the most annoying and game breaking bug, which was ultimately a wall clipping bug. The problem was players were using our dash mechanic, and it would accidentally cause them to clip into walls or blocks in our levels making them stuck and having to restart the level entirely. This was very frustrating to our players, and it made their play experience very poor unfortunately. It is because of that reason that I actually spent a lot of hours finding a solution to this bug.
At first, I tried casting a ray cast in either direction that my player was facing in order to detect when my player would nearly collide with a wall so that my dash mechanic could stop there. I was basically getting nowhere with this and I had to ultimately redesign how my player was moving completely. I used to move my player through transform.translate and apparently Unity physics does not like this, so I instead rewrote all my players movement to now rely on its rigidbody attached to it. Both my player movement and dash used to move that way so making these changes was definitely necessary. As soon as I did this I would no longer be able to clip into walls and that bug was 100 percent taken care of. This was a huge win and a massive relief because this bug was terrible and game breaking.
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