Seven Seas to Glory - Sprint Blog 5

Sprint 5

My goal for Sprint 5 was to implement everything that was created in Sprint 4 in a way that works with the rest of the elements of the game.

I started the sprint by making the ship’s movement more representative of a real pirate ship. The ship controller would previously be disabled whenever the player was not driving the ship. I changed it so that the ship script stays enabled, but only takes in the player’s input when they are driving the ship. This allowed for the ship’s rotation to be consistent in all modes, as well as made the ship’s momentum continue when the player was in cannon mode. To further enhance the feeling of driving the ship, I made the ship accelerate faster than it decelerates. I also ensured that the ship stopped its momentum completely any time the player was in character mode. Unfortunately, this caused an issue with the ship cannons only firing along the world z-axis, instead of the local z-axis. This problem had to be pushed to the next sprint, despite my teammate and me trying to fix it for a very long time.

Most of my sprint was dedicated to creating the shop system. I began by making the UI screen for the shop. I exported all the visuals for the shop separately, like the background, shop sign, item box, etc. This allowed for the screen to be properly adjusted to any screen type, as well as allow for reconfiguration of the screen so more items can be added to the shop in the future. I also made a description panel that explained what the different items did, which follows the mouse when it’s hovering over the corresponding item. This kept the screen from being too cluttered with words, while still giving the player the opportunity to learn about the items in the shop. I also made it so the shop creates a gray overlay over the rest of the screen, except for the inventory. I wanted the player to be able to use the inventory as a reference to what they had currently rather than create a different UI element for that.

After completing all of the necessary UI components and the script for the description panel, I then allowed the player to enter the shop screen when they went near the shop. Since the shop wasn’t completed at this point in the sprint, I used a block to represent the shop and I made the colliders prefabs for when the shop gets placed in the scene. I used the popup UI script that I made in a previous sprint, so the player knows that they are able to interact with the shop when they enter a specific vicinity. I then made another trigger collider that registers in the game canvas script which causes the shop UI to appear when the player presses E. The game also enters a pause state when the shop UI is open, so the player can’t get unexpectedly attacked.

In order to finish the shop feature, I had to create the script for buying the items. I made each item spot a button to make this step in the process easier. I created a script that’s attached to the shop panel which handles the process of adding and subtracting values from variables in the player class. I made a separate function to handle the comparisons between the item price and the amount of money the player had, and then display that the amount the player spent was subtracted or that the player didn’t have enough money. I wanted the player to have more of an obvious indication that their actions did something, rather than just the visual they get from the inventory.

When the shop feature was completed, I was able to move on to updating the save file to include the ship’s position, the player’s money, and the player’s items. Since I already made the logic for the save file earlier, it was easy to reinstate the save button and ensure that the save and load system still worked as it did previously. After verifying that it still worked, I added the new values that needed to be saved. I added the bullet, exploding cannonball, freezing cannonball, and money values to the save files, as well as the position and rotation of the ship. I removed the player position from the previous sprint because I thought it would be better to save the ship’s location and spawn the player on a given point on the ship instead. This would avoid the issue of the player not remembering where their ship was once the islands were placed in the scene. I also didn’t save the player’s health because the player’s health regenerates over time, which makes saving the health not make much sense. I was having quite a bit of issues with saving and loading the ship’s rotation. For a while, the ship would automatically load with a rotation of (0,0,0) no matter what the values were set to beforehand. At first, I was storing the Euler angles of the ship, and my professor said that using Euler angles instead of a quaternion could be causing the issue. After switching to storing the quaternion values, the issue persisted. I was able to discover that the ship controller’s late update function was causing the issue. I fixed it by setting the ship’s desired rotation to the stored value on startup.

Lastly, I limited the amount of bullets the player has. This gave more of a strategic use for the gun, rather than making it a primary weapon of choice. This was a very simple thing to implement.