Devlog 2 - 5/5/25

Micah:

This week I started off work on the game by creating a pause menu which has an option to resume the game, and to exit the application entirely. When the pause menu is triggered by pressing ESC, the physics engine pauses, disabling movement and the continuation of any physics processes. The pause menu also features a slider that modifies the master volume of the game, in response to receiving feedback that the game is a little too loud. A background music slider will be added shortly as well, although I haven't gotten around to doing this yet.

Secondly, I had to address the fact that the player's health could potentially become higher than the health bar supports, due to the health = wealth mechanic of the slot machine. I made so the player's health bar will extend proportionately to an increased balance on the slot machine, but won't recede upon losing health (so that it's obvious when you take damage). I put a cap on the slot machine so you can't go over a particular amount of health so that the health bar stays on screen. For testing reasons, the up and down arrows can be used to directly adjust health. 

Lastly, I needed to do something about the fact that the tower was too large for the player to fight, so I added in another NPC who delivers two lots of dialogue, and shrinks the clock tower down to a more reasonable size in between. In the final version of the game, this NPC will have to be interacted with before the final boss fight can begin.

The miniature clocktower is the exact same as the larger one, only smaller and featuring a red circle that indicates its attack radius (I haven't decided whether or not to include some kind of attack radius indicator in the final game, but this will likely be removed). I began work on the clock tower's attacks by creating a basic attack, and special attack, which is just a combo of the basic attacks with faster movement speed. These attacks work for the most part, but need a bit more work before they are fully functional.

Fabian:

This week I worked on an attack mechanic for the game. As the main attack in the game will be ranged, I started by creating a script which shoots a projectile object from the player's location when the LMB is pressed. 

As shown above this was looking a bit goofy and was coming out of the player directly, to counter this I created a very basic staff as a child object of the player to make it look and function better. By adding this the character stopped the funny bouncing however, it was not fully fixed yet.

The next problem was that the projectiles were extremely difficult to aim and seemed to have a mind of their own on where they would go. After many different troubleshooting techniques and debugging added to the code all with the varying success, it was found that the problem was a combination of the way I was trying to use the mouse position to shoot, along with some colliders which were interfering with the movement of the projectile object. 

After removing the unnecesary colliders and making so the weapon shoots in the direction the staff is facing, the shooting mechanic is looking and functioning beautifully.

Daneika:

This week I created all the animations for our favourite Bug Boi. I created the basic animations of walk, jump, and idle, along with dash. I will admit that when working out the different stages that I would have to animate to make it look realistic, I did pace and jump around my room a lot. Before I could start animating however, I did have to rig up the body with armatures (think bones for animating).  To create the basics of the rig, I used the basic meta rig, then adapted that to work with our wonderful character.

This is what the final rig looked like:

Here are the animations (in order: walk, jump, idle, dash):