470 Sprint 6

Work Done

For this sprint, I focused on making improvements to the AI, adding to the hoop magnet functionality, and adding music for each arena.

For the enemy AI, there was an issue with the knockback force that it would apply to the player. This was fixed during this sprint and the enemy AI now adds a force to the player's rigid body during the game. This was worked on because it was the prominent issue in the playtest feedback. Almost all players had an issue with the enemy clipping into the player at least once in their playthrough.

For the magnet feature, before this sprint, it would attract the ball but there was no way for the ball to be released from the magnet's position. To fix this, I implemented a coroutine that would act as a cool-down for the magnet. I made it so that if the ball is within a certain distance of the magnet it would deactivate for three seconds. This worked out well since the magnet turns off before the ball reaches the exact location of the magnet resulting in an attraction effect that isn't as obvious as before. This was worked on during this sprint because prior playtest feedback highlighted the player's difficulty in scoring a goal.

For the music, I added onto the audio clips in the game manager and had each song play for the corresponding arena that was loaded in. This was one of the first elements I added to the game that was more of a want than a need. An issue I ran into was that there is one audio source game component, and there is a function implemented that stops the audio player when the game countdown clock hits 0. This was an issue because the arena music would start but when the match started, all music would be turned off. I collaborated with Christian on this issue and it was resolved by restarting the audio source with the specific song after the countdown ended. This was able to get the music to start playing again. It was added because we wanted to show the unique theme of each enemy team and adding a song during gameplay was a relatively simple and effective way to convey this.

Work Not Completed

One of the issues that was worked on but not completed was having the enemy rats space out between each other. Initially, my thought process was to have only one rat be allowed in the attack state, and the other rats would either chase the ball or defend. This needed to be revised because once there are teammate rats, it wouldn't make sense to have only one rat in the attack state. The second attempt had the rats stay a certain distance from each other at all times. This worked somewhat but the same issue occurred where the rats would bunch up to each other, this time just with more space between each other. It somewhat worked but it is not what we had envisioned for the spacing out, so we decided to keep working on it. With the last sprint coming up, this will be the priority to have in the finished build.

Another issue that came up during playtests was that if the ball and the player are within range of an enemy rat, the enemy rat becomes stuck and continuously switches from attack to chase state. This causes a freeze effect on the enemy so it stays in place until one of the objects leaves the range. Some work was started on this bug but since this was discovered at the end of the sprint, it will be focused on in sprint 7.