Continuing the focus on the most utilised mechanics in any third person platformer, in the second week I began work on the basic character movement script. The intention was to create general directional movement and some subtle other movement features in a BasicCharacterMovement base class, and have the advanced components such as jumping mechanics, sliding mechanics etc. in an AdvancedCharacterMovement script.

Some notable features of the basic character movement are -

• Joystick and WASD directional movement using Rigidbody physics. The characters forward direction is taken for the normaslised forward direction of the camera.
• A subtle acceleration and decelleration on starting movement and stopping, as well as movement speed thresholding to the amount the joystick is pushed.
• A halting coroutine when the sudden change in direction is over a maximum degree threshold (imitating the realistic movement of turning on ones heel, this was inspired after playing the incredibly immersive The Witcher 3!)

Initial plans for the jumping mechanics are still in debate but simplistic public variables for a jump and double jump force have been exposed for the designers to see if a typical double jump mechanic would be suitable for our game.

During this week we also elected leaders for each specialisation, with Darien taking the role of lead programmer. We also had a meeting in which the programmers (driven by Thor, who presented his own materials) introduced the rest of the team scrum methodology and a variety of software that will equip the team well to handle large scale group work. We elected to use Trello for scrum and task management, while using GitHub and GitHub Desktop for our source & version control. This meeting drew parallels with the initial days of starting a new group project in many software companies and had a good sense of professionalism to it, as we ensured that the team were familiarised and well equipped to move forwards as the project picks up pace.

While waiting to get feedback on the movement and further clarity on how more advanced movement mechanics should be implemented, I have begun looking at shader possibilities to improve visuals in the game in an inexpensive way for artists. Through this, I’ve started looking into concentric fur shells, the technique used to give Ratchet his furry appearance in Ratchet & Clank.