Week 13, Day 10: The Invisible Planets

 The goal for today was to get the planets that needed to be blacked out blacked out while still having access to their original textures. How to do this? First I created a Boolean to keep track of weather the planet was visible or not. That was simple enough, but I ran into problems when I attempted to change the textures based on this variable. I tried several ineffective and weird things like attempting to put references to each and every texture within every planet and only using the applicable ones. This would have required me to put 21 references within each prefab so that would have taken a very long time. Every planet only would need two references so I just decided to use two general names. As you can see by the picture to the right I've created a reference to the texture "none" as well as a reference to a texture "norm". For each planet none is always the file blackbox.jpeg  but the reference within norm does vary. The reason for this is so that none can be used when the planet is supposed to be blacked out and "norm" can be used when the planet is its normal color. So far this seems to be working so I shall continue down this route. In other news I also fixed a slight error I didn't know that the game had. Apparently my spawner script was creating six times as many planets and tourists as it needed within the hierarchy so I adjusted the spawn function accordingly. Next class the plan is to (hopefully) attach all the models to the planets and the tourists as well as starting some way of keeping track of the planets that the player owns.

Week 13, Day 9: Randomization and Spawning are Done

 Today I've finally removed all of the planets and the tourists from the hierarchy and all of them prefabs. Because of this I had to change the references within all of my arrays from the Game Objects in the hierarchy to the newly created prefabs in their respective folders. These folders were organized in the same way that I originally had the planets organized in the hierarchy as to maintain some normalcy. I also started to attach models to the grade four planets but I only have five of the fifteen models from my assets department so that is as far as I have gotten. Similarly with the tourists I have attached the needed tools to render them for when the models are handed over so that they can just be attached once they are ready. That's why some of the objects on the right are pink they are missing models so the default makes them pink. As you can see however the randomization of the planets works well since these two images are of consecutive tests of the game. Also my assets manager found a better background image so I put that in as well. As for next class hopefully I will be able to finish putting all of the models together and start making this a playable game. 

Week 12, Day 8: The Prefabination of the Solar System

Today my partner handed off the models for the planets so I went about attaching them to each of the planets that they needed to. I also decided that it would be easier to work with if all of the planets were just prefabs so I made all of them prefabs and organized them in a similar way to how they were in the hierarchy originally. The rotate script was also attached to the planets today as well so now instead of having ugly plain white planets I now have colorful, correctly lighted and rotating planets. All in all a good days work and now that I have this done writing the spawning algorithm should be far easier than it was before.

Week 12, Day 7: Interplanetary Shuffling

Today was spent learning how to shuffle game objects within an array upon the game starting. This was so that the objects would go back to their original and organized state when the game was not getting played. Needless to say there were several problems mainly when I was referencing the given variables because the algorithm itself was sound. Once I was done with this however I was able to apply this function to all of the arrays that needed it so essentially the "decks" of the grade one through four planets. This was also applied to the tourists for the same reasons. I also started working on a way of spawning the planets within the game but stumbled upon a few problems. One of which was weather to remove all of the planets from the hierarchy and make them all prefabs so that they could be created and destroyed more easily or weather to keep them as part of the hierarchy. I am still unsure of how to move the planets into their correct positions based on the spawn points that I have created however so that will need to be fixed the next time that I work on this. That I presume will take the entire class to get all of the spawns working for the grade one through four planets along with the tourists.

Week 11, Day 6: Spring Cleaning

Today I had significantly less time than usual to get work done on the project having only roughly 40 mins in total rather than close to three hours. Needless to say I was far less productive than I've usually been. So rather than attempting to start writing new scripts and get about halfway through before finishing I decided to do a bit of cleaning within the project by better organizing and sub-categorizing the game objects further for ease of access and adding the titles of each planet in front of each instance rather than calling them just one, two, three, etc. Also the tourists were subdivided into two categories based on weather they were two or three colors and due to the way that I have referenced the game objects there don't need to be any changes to the way that they are within the arrays. Overall not the post productive day but necessary evils were taken care of. Next up is the play test that I mentioned in my last post as well as starting the shuffling script that I had started to talk about.

Week 11, Day 5: Eyeball Melting Goodness

Today I was the most productive that I have been this whole project. I created the script that I mentioned in the last post. I even modified the planets script to include a checklist of the colors that the planets are. But the majority of my time was spent checking boxes, plugging in numbers and dragging around 125 different game objects into five arrays. I also changed the spawning locations a bit because they were not as evenly spaced as I first thought so it's good that I caught that when I did. So in total today I've spent about three hours straight looking at a computer monitor so needless to say my eyes feel fantastic, as I'm sure you can tell by the title. After this I plan on play testing the first version of the game this weekend to see if all of the game play changes are fun and balanced. I also plan on creating some kind of script that shuffles the game objects within their arrays so that the "decks" or arrays rather are randomized at the start of each game. The same type of script would be applied to the Tourists.

Week 11, Day 4: Scripting Starts

These this and the next post are being written after they took place so keep that in mind as I will be writing in the present tense. Today I decided to get some of the groundwork in place by creating a script that rotates the planets upon spawning. I also wrote a script that tracks the information about the planets as well as creating the spawn points for the planets. Aside from that I also created a background plane for the background to go on at a later date as well as creating and attaching spheres to all of the planets. Additionally I created a script that will keeps track of the information about the tourists. After this I plan on creating a script that just holds all of the game objects and shuffles them but keeps the decks separate as well. So there will be five arrays in total to keep track of within that script. Along with creating the script I will also be creating the tourists and filling them with their pertinent information.