Jumping to today, things are really picking up the pace. Unlike the first level, we only have one week to complete Levels 2 and 3 (one of the main reasons we've been jumping ahead). Talk about pressure. Since it was Monday I decided to treat myself to caffeine, but having an aversion to coffee, I sprung for a Coke. And ended up pretty hyper for the rest of the day. Jenny and Violet (Kiana and Ashley were stuck at home, but still working) tried to capture my occasional antics, but I managed to avoid that. Pics or it never happened right? But enough small talk. Let's get down to what happened today, and our plans for the rest of the week.
Violet and Kiana, over on the CAD Team, have been working hard on the CAD tutorials, and they are getting impressive, fast. And pretty difficult. They've quickly moved from the flashlight (Level 1) to the elevator pieces (Level 2), and are know tackling the Makeosity Energy Scooter (Level 3). Level 3 is where things get tough, for us and the player. The CAD tutorials slowly lay off on the hand holding, letting the player do more and more by themselves, until finally (hopefully), they can build a piece completely by themselves (with blueprints of course). If we do that, I would consider this game a major success. But it is definitely no easy task. Violet has been busy making one of the first pieces, the locking pin for the scooter, and experimenting with blueprints in Fusion 360. Take a look at one of her first blueprints.
Over on the Design side of things, Jenny has been doing a great job on designing Level 2, and is now moving onto Level 3.
Ashley, working at home like Kiana, has also made some pretty epic progress, working on parts for Level 3. Level 3 is the actual factory/construction floor, and we want it to look epic, and I am sure Ashley can deliver. Currently she is working on more conveyor belts, and starting to work on a robotic arm that I am sure will end up looking kick ass. A lot of the work is still in progress, so no screenshots today (sorry), but they will be coming soon.
Finally, there is me. I started off as Player Controls, but at this point I've been working on all sorts of things, adding finishing touches to the rooms (go rolling doors) and working on the overall code framework. Kiana nailed it when she called me the middleman. Essentially, I make the frame, click the pieces into place, and make sure the final product actually works. Currently I've been working on having our game save and load (mostly because if I have to watch the 15 second long opening scene one more time, I will probably go insane). One of the harder things about Unity is that when you have a complex level, with moving pieces, it can be hard to store the necessary information, and flip back and forth. I ended up using a combination of static variables, structs, and mock singletons (a commonly used method in Unity apparently), in order to make sure our main scripts, the ones that store all of the important information, don't get muddled up. In the process, I had to do something a bit quirky. If any of you readers are current FRC Java programmers, let us see if you can spot the reference.
And of course I would never forget the selfie.
-- Arun, an A of JAVAK