Movement, Controllers, and Putting Code Together

It’s the end of the first week of development. While the art team was working on laying out the concept for story and character design, the programming team worked on a quick prototype of the game mechanics.

I was in charge of getting a movement system setup, along with controller support for the two players. I had some old code from a previous 2D platformer project so I used that as a base. Since this game will have two players, I had to decide how the camera would function. Since the brother is the slower of the two characters, I had the camera follow him exclusively. The sister’s position in the game has no affect on the camera. I added restraints to the sides of the screen so that the sister can’t wander off where the camera won’t see her.

Controller support was some work. The process behind setting it up isn’t too difficult once you know what you’re doing. But before you do understand the process, it’s a bit obtuse. Unity has a list of input settings to toy with, but the setting names don’t always convey what they actually do. For example, I made a setting that mapped jumping to a button on Player 1’s controller. I edited the setting to “Controller 1”, which I thought would keep that button to Player 1’s controls. However in testing, jumping with that setting caused Player 2 to jump too. Turns out setting “Controller 1” only works for certain situations, and otherwise you have to name the button according the the controller you want to use. Once I figured that out it was easy, but it was annoying getting there.

Lastly I took the code from the other coders and added it to what I had. Unfortunately not all of it worked, so I had to cut down or dummy down some of the features we would have liked to have for our prototype. Next week though we’ll be having a meeting on how to better share our code.

Week 1 had a pretty tight schedule and I didn’t get any sleep tonight, but at least the demo’s finished.

See you next week.

-Noah Nam

Our prototype, with rough placeholder art. The reused character sprite is from King of Fighters, Noah’s favorite fighting game.

Character and Enemy Concepts (Chris & Syd)

Syd and I further discussed the features we wanted to see in the game’s main characters, and then we threw a couple different sketches back and forth to explain visually. Eventually we ended up with two possible directions for the big sister and two for the younger brother. Each sketch has a preliminary color palette, but they’re nowhere near final. Both the sketch and the colors are to be iterated on according to how the group responds in our next meeting.

We tackled the enemy concepts with a similar approach, deciding on what some light enemies could be, what the final boss might be, and then talked about shark being the likely heavy enemies. Both of those have sketches and color now too.

Team Organization

One key to any successful group undertaking is organization. In every sense of the word. This, of course, takes the form of our various technologies and setups to keep our team on the same page — Trello, Discord, Google Drive, and the like. But this was prefaced by an even more broad discussion: that of who would take on what responsibilities. Completely by chance, we wound up with a pretty balanced team: of the eight of us, four were interested and able to handle coding; the rest were ready to cover 2D art, modeling, and/or animation; enough people were interested in taking on some aspect of project management that we would be sufficiently covered in that regard as well. At the end of our first discussion, our team organization looked like this:

 

Programmers:

Noah Nam

John Harvey

Erin Truesdell

Tom Dragna

 

Modelers/Animators:

Mike Moore

Kane Fitzgerald

John Harvey

 

Artists:

Sydney Oswald

Chris Lucas

Mike Moore

 

Writers:

Sydney Oswald

Mike Moore

Chris Lucas

Tom Dragna

 

— Erin Truesdell

Journal 5/3/17

The entire group met for a few hours and pitched ideas and concepts. We ended up settling on a side scrolling co-op game and began a discussion on the overall concepts we’d like to address in the game. With a possible focus on the fellowship aspect of a co-op game, we brought up the idea of two siblings walking home and creating their environment with their imagination.

 

— Sydney Oswald

First Post: Team Name, New Site, Organization!

Welcome to Team Broccoli Mom!

Erin Truesdell, Chris Lucas, Kane Fitzgerald, Sydney Oswald, Tom Dragna, Mike Moore, Noah Nam, and John Harvey.

It’s the first week of development for us.

Class and the assignment were on Monday. We held our first meeting on Wednesday, where we discussed individual strengths and spent two hours pitching ideas, discussed, and voted until we had selected our final concept: a forced-coop side-scroller featuring the fantasy adventures of a big sister and a little brother on their way home from school.

Friday was our next team meeting. We set up this site for production journals, set up a team Google Drive, and a team Trello. Communication-wise, we’ve set up a Facebook group chat and a Discord channel. And, of course, we selected a team name. Sydney took on setting up our sprint records, and tasks were assigned to team members according to their abilities.

 

— Erin Truesdell