NovaStar — Base Functionality Complete
Day 32–12/07/20
Today, we spent pretty much the entire day meeting with each other. It was a lot of meeting time, but definitely well worth it going forward. We cleaned up a lot of our scripts and assets by organizing them into appropriate folders. This was a bit time consuming, but I think it has taught everyone to try to think of organization ahead of time, as it can save a lot of time down the road and also a lot of headaches. Moving scripts and assets around can be a little bit of a process as you need to go back and check everything to make sure everything is attached in the proper position.
After our organization, we then brainstormed our next phase or sprint for our project, Phase 2.0. In the google sheet above you can see our task breakdown for this next phase. We also decided to create an abstract class as the base for all of our enemies. We realized that the abstract class needed to be done asap, and so immediately after we brainstormed our next run of tasks, we scripted out the abstract class together.
As you can see, our abstract class is a very barebones skeleton of an enemy. It has all the base functions you would find on most enemies in any game. Movement, Weapon Fire, Damage taken, etc. We decided to do damage a little differently than I am used to. Instead of putting the collision detection on the enemy, we decided to put it on the weapons since Kurt and Mar had already scripted the damage functions onto the weapon. So to allow this, we created a Damage function that we can call in the weapon script to communicate with the enemy how much damage was taken. And actually, there was one weapon we used collision detection for on the enemy, the charged laser beam.
After our abstract class was complete and we were all satisfied we then moved on to our favorite topic, gitHub. With our initial phase now finished, it was time to push a new baseline to the upstream. Around we went, one-by-one pulling from the upstream to our local dev branch, merging with our latest feature branch, and then pushing back to the upstream dev branch. So as of right now, we all have the latest baseline version of our program on our computers.
Other than all I have mentioned, not a whole lot of work done on the project. But I think today was very important for all of us from a growth perspective. I think working through our next round of goals and organizing everything is going to pay off down the road. Hopefully, with our goals laid out clearly, we will all be able to progress quickly in the next day or two.
