Devlog #3

Josh – Player & Enemy Prefabs 🧱, Animations 🎭, & Prototyping 🧪

This week, Josh set up a working player prefab using the newly added Meat Man model. The prefab includes all required components like an Animator, NavMeshAgent, and core scripts responsible for things like movement, input, and combat. Once the player setup was functional, Josh duplicated and modified the prefab to create an enemy variant using the same mesh.

The animations for this model had already been created and imported into the project by Hakki, so Josh set up an Animator Controller with the required transitions and states. These included idle, run, attack, damage, and death. The animations were wired up via code to trigger correctly in response to various events taking place.

After Eve added the new pirate ship greybox level, Josh configured a NavMesh for the scene and placed the player and a few enemies into the level for testing. The scene was then built into a standalone early prototype to share with the teaching staff for feedback.

Hakki - Jump animation, Pause Menu and Prettying the Main Menu

This week, Hakki had set up an additional animation for the meat puppet in the form of jumping. It is currently not the best of friends with the actual jump feature so hoping to get it fixed soon.

Hakki then worked on the pause menu that appears with a click on the ESC Key. It allows you to either resume to the current gameplay, restart the level just in case the player gets into a situation of being softlocked and the quit option which takes you back to the main menu. This has been implemented into the main level as well as the test stage.

After finishing the basic pause menu, Hakki then added flair to both pause and main menu so it is not bland and boring but unique and cool (Hakki hopes).

🐛 Challenges Faced This Week

A number of issues occurred this week that greatly slowed Josh’s progress but ultimately helped to refine the systems:

• Jumping looked weird or didn’t reset properly: Sometimes the player would jump and never return to standing normally, or the animation would just snap back too fast. It turned out the game wasn’t properly detecting when the player had landed.
   

• The jump animation played twice: The character would start the jump animation before actually leaving the ground, then do it again mid-air. This made things feel broken. This was fixed by adjusting when the game tells the character to start jumping.
   

• Enemy and player were confusing each other’s animations: Since they both used the same model, things got mixed up. One character would sometimes play the wrong animation or not respond at all. In some cases, the player’s actions would accidentally trigger animations for all enemies. Fixing this required making sure the game could tell the player and enemies apart using tags, and only allowing each script to trigger animations for the correct character.
   

• Getting the enemy pathfinding to work properly on the stairs in the pirate ship level proved unexpectedly tricky. Enemies would either get stuck halfway up, or not be able to move on them at all. After a lot of trial and error, including changing NavMesh settings and rebaking multiple times, the movement finally started working, though it’s still a bit unreliable. It’s something that will likely need more tweaking later in development.
   

• One strange issue during setup was that the player and enemy models appeared to be sinking into the ground. At first, it looked like a problem with colliders or object placement, but the real cause was that none of the animation clips were remaining assigned to the states in the controller. Without animations playing, the character models sink into the floor, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. The only solution was to recreate the entire animation controller from scratch. The root cause is still unclear, and it’s likely just an example of Unity being buggy.