Milestone 9 (Naomi)

Overview

This sprint, we continued to work on our individual tasks. Since a lot of our tasks are reliant on each other, we met up a few times to work in the same space to make communication more efficient and so we could help each other more easily. My individual tasks are listed in the following sections

Rigging and Animating Final Boss

Due to the shape of the final boss, it was not a model that I could put into Mixamo. It was also not simple enough to animate with transforms like the smaller enemies. This led me to create a very simple rig for it. I then animated on the bones directly instead of creating control curves, which is not the best practice, but was due to time constraints. Below are the resulting idle, attack and death animations for the final boss: 

 And below is what the skeleton looks like: 

The animations are not currently implemented into Unity, which is something I will need to work on before the final submission.

Implementing Health Restoration Chamber

The health restoration chamber's purpose is to restore the player's health if they enter it. It has visual feedback such as a green light, a cross particle system (I made the sprite for this in photoshop), and an animation and sfx that plays once the player is inside. I modelled it in Maya, textured it in substance painter and attached a script to it to handle the health restoration.

Unfortunately it seems to have stopped working (doesn't restore health anymore) between various commits and pulls. I couldn't pin point what the issue was so that is something I will have to fix for the final submission 

Texturing Enemies

I textured all of the enemies in substance painter referring to Sumaiya's character reference images. I drew the details on myself, and the body colour is just a fill layer.

Implementing Final Enemy Models to Game

With the enemies textured and animated, I was able to import them into the game. I set up animation controllers and connected them to scripts so that they would play at the correct time. I also set up a particle system to shoot at the player if they get too close. The script will have the player lose health while being shot at.

I also fixed the enemies clipping through everything. The only thing that still needs to be done visually is fixing their death animation. Right now, sometimes it doesn't play properly because the animator controller tells it to wait until the idle state is finished before it can switch to the death state. There is a timer in the script that destroys the object after a certain amount of time passes, however, if the enemy is just starting or midway through the idle state, then the death state never gets a chance to play before the object is destroyed. This is something I will need to fix in the final submission, but it should be a quick fix.

I also added spawners so that enemies spawn in each room of the environment rather than just the temporary ones we had for testing

I still need to implement the animations and attacks for the final boss, but its final model is in the project now.

Compositing and Implementing Sound Effects

In CapCut, I put together some sound effects for the enemies. I combined some chosen sounds together, added filters to some of the clips and used some of CapCut's built in audio assets to add to the sound.

I implemented these into Unity for the final boss using a script. The boss introduction plays before the boss first spawns. Then while it is alive, it will randomly alternate between sounds in an array to add some variety. 

The sounds for the regular enemies are in Unity, however I still need to connect them to a script so that they actually do something. The plan is to also have them choose from an array of 3 options, also for the sake of variety as the same repeating sound would get annoying.

Implementing Custom Animated Hands for VR

Instead of using the default hands in VR, we wanted to use our own. I have some animated hands that I made myself and have used throughout the course, so I was able to import them into the project. This is further elaborated on in the Challenges section.

Trello Board

Finally, here is what our trello board looks like. A lot of progress has been made, with only a few things still in "To do" and "In Progress" (which are mainly for aesthetic purposes)

Challenges

When implementing the particle attacks from the enemies, I had the issue of it not causing any damage. This was because it was not detecting the particles colliding with the player. I tried several different methods to get the collision to detect but nothing was working. Eventually I decided to scrap the collision detection entirely, and just have the player lose health no matter what if an enemy is shooting at them.

Another issue I had was implementing my own hand models into the game to replace the default ones. I was able to successfully transfer it from one of my other assignments, however a lot of the logic and general functionality wasn't working with the new hands. Zineb and I worked on it together since she set up the default hands and we did make progress. However it was taking a significant amount of time, and this is not an important feature of our game, so we ended up having to push it aside for the time being. We will come back to it if we have time before the final submission.

Successes

One major success was getting enemies to stop going through everything like ghosts. This was a major problem during our Beta version, but I was able to fix it by changing the way things collided (using the rigid body instead of the collider). There were a lot of scenarios that I had to account for (for example, the enemy getting stuck forever because it never reached its target after something was blocking it), but I was able to figure them all out and the enemies behave much better now.

Another success was just how much we got done this sprint. Compared to last week with not getting as much done as we had wanted, we are now in very good shape for the final submission, with just a few things that need to be enhanced, mainly aesthetic elements.

Hours spent

It total we spent about 58.34 hours on this sprint

My Tasks

Rigging and Animating Final Boss: 3.5 hours

Health Restoration Chamber: 6 hours

Texturing Enemies: 1 hour

Enemy implementation into Unity: 8 hours

Enemy Spawners: 1 hour

Compositing Sound Effects: 45 minutes

Implementing Boss Sound Effects: 2 hours

Attributions Document (briefly started): 15 minutes

Implementing custom animated hands: 2.5 hours

Sumaiya's Tasks

Refining the introduction cutscene: 2 hours

Integrating core UI elements (pause/play buttons, health and progress/score bars) into Unity: 2 hours

Fixing UI responsiveness: 40 minutes

Fixing EnemiesKilled counter issue: 1 hour

Updating game instructions - ongoing

Zineb's Tasks

Environment Design: 5hrs

VR Swinging Motions: 7hrs

Teleportation to Central: 1hr

Adding Particles to Player Attack: 40mins

VR Headset Setup: 12hrs

Fixing Final Boss Spawning for VR: 1hr

All

Final Presentation slides: 1 hour