CAGD 370 BlogPost 4

For Sprint 4, my team and I ran into some issues relating to merging files and changes on GitHub. This was a huge issue for us because this led to our game breaking and Unity not allowing us to open our project. A large part of this issue was due to inexperience with GitHub and trying to solve our software issues by trial and error. Eventually, I decided to talk to my programming professor, (professor Jeff Underwood), to see how I could fix this. It was confusing at first, but now I can confidently say that my team and I are competent GitHub users.

Working GitHub Repository with Unity Project

GitHub Troubleshooting

The biggest issue we had with GitHub was that we were all trying to upload our changes to the main branch, which is a big no-no. Jeff taught me that everyone should be working on their own branch and never work directly on the main branch. Another thing we were not doing was fetching the origin when we started GitHub Desktop. This led to people working on the outdated files from main. They were working on the old iterations of the Unity project and trying to upload changes to the old main branch. I went over this with my team and let them know that they must fetch origin before starting any changes.

Working on GitHub with Jeff

I also showed them how to make their own branches and to always work on their own branch away from the main branch. We then tested changes they made in their branch and pushed them to the main branch. After this, they created a pull request to upload to the GitHub website. This way everyone would receive the changes that teammates made locally. This worked well and now we have a solid workflow for uploading changes from Unity into GitHub so everyone can see changes on a central project.

Testing Team Mate Changes on GitHub

Jumping Refinements

One of the issues we thought needed to be addressed by the playtest was letting the player move midair. This was not an issue before, but with the wall jump feature added the player was not allowed to move midair after making a jump. This was because the wall jump used a normal force to equal the jump force when jumping on a GameObject tagged "Wall". This made the wall jump function as anticipated and gave the player the best movement feedback. I had to come to a compromise where the player was allowed to move midair at the cost of wall jumping not working as efficiently. The wall jump still worked, but the player had to press the arrow key and press the space bar while on a wall to wall jump in the desired direction. Before, the player only had to press the space bar and the function in the code would have the ball jump in the opposite direction (the normal direction of the object's face) for the player. The player can still wall jump with no issue but will need to use more controls to execute the movement. I hope to fix this in the refinement stages of Sprint 5.

Changing the Movement Code to Allow Midair Movement

Camera Sensitivity and Refinements

We tried to change the FOV of the player so the player could see more, however this did not work as intended and left players feeling uneasy about the depth perception. I made sure to change it back to normal after playtests and it was no longer an issue. Another issue we came across in the playtest was camera sensitivity. Some players felt that the mouse movement was too jumpy and sensitive. After the playtests I made sure to change the sensitivity values and test out which values would be best for the target audience. People wanted to move with camera-based movement. Right now, the directions of movement are set at north, south, east, west. I need to change the system to move the player in the direction that the player is facing with the camera. This will make the movement much smoother, and the player will enjoy the gameplay more.

Updated Sensitivity for Camera