Release 2 Impact

For release two, our goals as a team focused on enhancing level systems, creating more engaging interactions, and providing more feedback to the player. With another engineer working on feedback, I focused heavily on level systems and interactions. Our first priorities for level interactions were basic moving platforms and doors/barriers. Although I knew these would be somewhat basic systems, I used this as an opportunity to grow my skills. To do this, I built these simple systems into robust, customizable tools that allow our designers to easily implement unique features.

Check out release one impact!

Major Contributions

Dynamic Level Systems

Moving Platforms

Moving platforms are easily one of the most simple features to program from a base perspective but my goal with this system was to build a much more feature rich tool than one might expect from a simple moving platform. This was accomplished primarily through the use of custom inspector scripts which I go over here.

Given the scope of features I wanted to provide, it was important that the system remained bug free and performant.

Of course, no task is simple when working in a large project. Challenges arose while building these features and had to be dealt with accordingly.

Video - Moving Platforms

Translation Options

The primary feature I built into this system is the option to use differing translation types. I started with default linear pathing between nodes but knew it had to be expanded further. In addition to standard linear, the system offers options for damp motion, translation via a steering algorithm, or translation via linear interpolation along an animation curve set in the inspector. Setting up the system in such a way that all of these movement options were valid was one of the more demanding tasks for this work.

Linear

Curve

Damp

Steering

Adjusting Player Motion

Most platform systems I have previously designed handle application of platform motion to the player by setting the platform object as a parent of the player object. In many cases, this is an easy and effective way of translating the player in conjunction with the platform. For this project, we designed the character controls using the unity character controller. Due to the interactions behind the scenes there, I was unable to achieve the desired behavior via a parent/child relationship. To overcome this I modified the player to accept an additional vector while calculating motion, this vector is then supplied by any platform that they have made contact with.

Apply Motion

Consume Motion

Custom Barriers

Similar to my approach with moving platforms. I wanted the barrier system to be equally robust and feature rich. Much of this took the form of custom inspector scripts, but I also implemented a few features to simplify the system for both myself and designers.

Video - Custom Barriers

Event Handling

I knew immediately while brainstorming on this that I would be using events to handle communication between the parent object and individual barrier segments. My primary reasoning for this was a desire to avoid storing arrays of barrier segments for each parent GameObject. The use of events makes the system more performant while also providing easy communication between scripts.

Delegate & Events

Subscriptions

Linq Lambda Boolean

Another small but interesting feature was my use of a lambda expression for one of the key boolean variables utilized. Barriers have the potential to be locked with any number of keys, keys can be stored in a key manager inventory, but I needed a quick way to check if a specific door should be unlocked.

Lambda Expression

Custom Editors

One of my biggest learning moments while working towards this release was my discovery of custom editor scripts. I had never used them before, but I found them easy to use while providing huge benefits to the customization and usability of these systems.

Object Instantiation

The most prominent feature I included via custom editor code was the ability to add and remove system objects from the inspector. This added multiple benefits, firstly, no more hunting for the correct prefab when adding segments, nodes, and keys. On top of this, using the inspector callouts to delete objects ensured that they do not persist as null entries in any collections used.

Dynamic Inspector Display

Another helpful feature I was able to achieve via custom editor code was a dynamic display for the platform inspector. Given the many translation options mentioned earlier, I wanted a way for designers to easily differentiate between options that only affect certain movement types. This also allowed me to keep the inspector from becoming bloated with information. I accomplished this via a switch statement that only rendered properties needed for the selected translation state.

Translation Type Switch

Linear

Curve

Damp

Steering

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