This week I added secondary mechanics such as torches and flares, and looked into more AI elements. We now have a flare that allows the player shoot something and see further then he ever could before. We also have a torch that the player can place to have a place permanently lit.
I improved the wandering AI. There was a bug in the AI that was causing the spiders to mass in the center causing distress for the players. I looked into this and now it seams that the spiders wander all over the map equally making the mass of spiders much less likely.
I looked into how I could do walking on walls/ceilings with the current AI system I was using. It turned out not to be possible with unity's navmesh system. There is a strict limit on the slope for navigation meshes so it is impossible to go strait up walls. I talked to Lawson about this during my discipline review. He suggested just to involve simple iterations with walls if we want to do stuff with walls, such as going strait up to a window rather then path-finding around the wall. Based on the feedback of my group though, this is not a huge thing and can be looked more into later in development.
I also started working on a jumping attack. I am currently doing all of my spider movement using unity navmeshagent. This does not allow me to tell the spider to jump. Because of this I will attach a rigidbody temporarily to do my jump physics and remove it to go back to AI after the jump is complete. When I was working on this yesterday I was unsure of how the jump sequence should happen so I talked about it in our team meeting. We decided that we would have the spider jump towards the player a a certain distance, and when it hit something it would stop moving in the horizontal direction and just fall strait down. If the something it hit was the player it would do damage. We also discussed having an animation for the initial jumping off the ground, in the air, hitting the player, and landing.
We were originally planning on presenting for stage 2. At the end of the week we all agreed, however, that it would be better to give ourselves some more time. For stage to we are supposed to demonstrate our core experience and I did not feel we were there yet.
We had talked about definitely wanting some sort of melee system but we have yet to jump into what that exactly entails. We talked about having it not do damage but just knock enemies back. Regardless of what we decide to do with it, I think it is a core part of our player experience.
