Capstone Week 24 - Build Assembly and Retrospectives

Today I spent a good amount of time bringing in different features from various people into the build. These include (please forgive me if I forgot to include yours or don't mention you on here):

• Ryan F's out of bounds wall
• Ryan F's wall "hit" effect
• A nice shader feature that I will be looking at to see how he did it
• Mario & Geoff's new level iteration
• Alex's William Tell armor and crossbow

Also I integrated my work that was done that I discussed in my previous 2 posts. This next day of class we will go over these changes and see what everybody thinks.

Tomorrow is also retrospectives for midterms! There are a couple things I know already that I didn't do the greatest on:

1. Attending online meetings - There were a few online meetings that I just forgot to show up to, which is unlike me. I think this was just because of our changes in times for meetings, but I should've been at a lot more of the meetings. The one plus to this is that each time I wasn't able to make a meeting, I did post a standup and a notice that I wouldn't be there.
2. Getting work done early - For some reason I've suffered from a temporary bout of procrastination this first half of the semester, tending to do my work more towards Sunday and Monday nights. I know this needs to change for me personally, as I hate staying up too late (which doing this forces me to do) and it also gives me less time to work on my tasks. I'll be working on getting my tasks started earlier this next half of the semester as I should have been doing this whole time.

For this first half of the semester I would give myself a 4. While I was doing good quality work, I felt I could have (and should have) done more. I should've pushed further into researching shaders and just generally pushed myself to do more, as I know I can.

Capstone Week 23 - Menu Controller Support

This week I got the rest of my tasks done. These are listed below!

Done:

• Main menu controller support - I ended up going with the plan I mentioned in my previous blog post about using Unity's navigation flow to allow a controller to navigate through the menus. In the image to the right, you can see the navigation flow arrows that Unity visualizes for you. This allows you to see the flow of navigation and easily know what is going to go where. This was created using the "Explicit" type of navigation on the buttons. This can be seen in the next image. I use explicit because I don't want the navigation on this menu to be interacting with the UI elements on any other menu unless explicitly (ha! I'll show myself out.) desired. It is a very nice feature being able to specify the direction that you want as well, and Unity even visualizes your custom links for you (hence the image at the top with the arrows). Once we get an official options menu design, I can then setup the navigation for that as well. I also included a picture of part of the script I wrote down at the bottom of this post. There you can see how I handled moving between each button.
  
• HUD Rework - I also was in charge of implementing Samuel Neils design for the HUD rework. It actually turned out to be a nice design once implemented, as I had my doubts based on the Google Draw that Sam had made. But with a little nice touch here and there it really stands out now! Images of the new EKG location/design are shown below. I also have pictures of the new loadout "look" but they aren't the greatest so I'm going to retake them and I'll include them in my next post. The EKG works slightly different this time around. As you can see, it was moved to the left-hand side of the screen. It was then stretched so it filled the left hand side when at full health. As you lose health, the EKG moves closer to the center of the screen, the color changes, and your health percentage is shown floating above it. All of this happens with a lovely, smooth Lerp, so it appears the EKG and text are sliding to their new position rather than "teleporting". This makes for a nice system, and will look especially cool if there's a sudden drop in health, or if there is any DOT on the player.