After looking at some of the subtle features in games like Super Mario 64, Jake (Lead Artist) also noted that many platformer games aimed at a varied age audience will allow control over the camera to the user, but when the camera is not being controlled will have some degree of automatic alignment, so as to not burden the player and allow them to focusing on controlling the character if they wish.
I have implemented camera realignment to behind the player when the camera is not being manually moved and the player is moving, but I am currently tackling a bug in this when the angle the camera is slerping to crosses over the -180 to 180 degree boundary that Unity has in it’s 3d space co-ordinates rather than using a 0 to 360 degree range. The result is a jittery rubber banding effect between slerp left and right as the program struggles to determine which direction it should move to reach the desired angle.
I also created a temporary transitioning screen graphic and script, with the intention of using the script for both death screens and loading between levels/menu transitions. The script uses coroutines to transition between two target scale and rotations on a UI image, which also persists between scenes to ensure that on asynchronous level loading the image respects it’s current rotation and scale variables in the scene. The coroutine looks a little like this -
IEnumerator RevealLevel()
{
scaleSpeed /= 5;
Quaternion resetRot = Quaternion.Euler(0, 0, 0);
loadingMask.transform.rotation.Set(resetRot.x, resetRot.y, resetRot.z, resetRot.w);
loadingMask.enabled = true;
do
{
RotateImage(360.0f);
ScaleImage(new Vector3(160,160,1));
yield return null;
} while (loadingMask.transform.localScale.x < 79.5f); //For some reason I cannot seem to get this to go beyond 40 when scaling back up?
scaleSpeed *= 5;
loadingMask.enabled = false;
loadingMask.transform.localScale = new Vector3(100, 100, 1);
resetRot = Quaternion.Euler(0, 0, 180);
loadingMask.transform.rotation = resetRot;
}The resulting transition works nicely for hiding the respawn or level loading
In terms of teamwork there has been a slight imbalance in the work produced and workload given on sprints, whcih has lead to some tensions in the team. We have maintained professionalism about this though, as we got the group together to discuss these concerns and left with renewed efforts and reassurance that more models would be engine-ready soon, boosting everyones morale.