Game Dev in Progress… Day 36
It is day 36 of my voyage to becoming a Software Engineer. Today has been a lot of development and also a bit of frustration. I ran into a problem with animations which I will talk about at the end of the article. I was tasked to create the unique enemy waves that will happen in the game. I needed to design 2 unique waves that will play every 3 waves. Every other wave is randomized or is a boss wave. I am using animations in order to create the waves since its a lot easier to do.
Me and Dylan worked on the wave manager a bit and tried to figure out what Chris did in order to understand how it works. We made just one small adjustment which was the spawn rate of the enemies. Instead of setting it in the inspector, we decided that it was best to randomize it. Other then that, we started play testing some of the enemy prefabs that were developed. We realized that some of them are super hard. We had to turn god mode on in order not die immediately. So that’s another thing we should fix after we hit MVP.
The next thing we did was having Dylan show me how to animate the enemies. I have experience working with animations from the cinematography course but my understanding of it pales in comparison to Dylan’s. I didn’t even know you could grab several of the key frames at the same time as well as lock my animation window!
After that we both started to work on our individual unique waves. I was going to the first two waves while Dylan handled the last two. I was able to finish my first wave relatively easily but as I progressed to the second wave, I realized that I was animating the wrong prefab…
So yes… I have to reanimate my first unique wave. Since I know what to do now, I hope I can pump it out real quick and move on to my second wave. All in all, animation is a really powerful tool that can create unique effects with little coding involved. But as you can see with my predicament, it has it’s limitations.
The goal for tomorrow is to finish these unique waves and move on to my next task, which is to help my other team members with the UI. I also will be helping Ryan a bit with the game audio. With these tasks done, we should be nearing the end of the development cycle and finishing up for MVP tomorrow. Don’t be like me and check your animations, peace.
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Cristian Aspacio
