To organise this assignment we decided to use a simple, colour-coded MoSCoW sheet. I use this technique regularly when putting together my own solo projects and thought it would work just as well with a small team. It allows us to list out our deliverables, decide on our priorities, track our progress and split our workload among the group, all using one document to maximise efficiency. I also started a design document which we will use to lay out our ideas as we go along. For now though, as things are still a bit up in the air, the document just features a basic explanation of the premise. Below is an early version of our MoSCoW sheet.
Once we had things planned out, I set up the project in Unity. We originally planned to use Unity Collaborate to all work on the game simultaneously as this would allow us each to contribute to the project separately and simply sync any files we edit to one master version in the cloud, ensuring everyone is always working on the same version of the game. After setting up the project to use Collaborate however, I turned the service on and was greeted with a stream of critical errors. After some investigation I discovered that the Collaborate service had been discontinued but was still left in the editor for some reason. It had been replaced with a new third-party service but from what I could see, it required a paid subscription to use collaboratively and was much more complicated. With a large project it might have been worth getting to grips with the new service and buy a subscription, but since we are only putting together a prototype in a small team, we decided against it. Instead, I am holding the master build, the team are uploading any files they make or edit to our Team's chat, and I am incorporating them into new builds on a regular basis which I then distribute to the team so that they are working on the latest version.
With the project set up properly and our method of file-sharing decided on, I got to work on our top priority tasks, creating a player character with sideways movement and a jump. Originally I tried to put this together using Unity's visual scripting system as we've been studying it in class and it is new to me so I thought it would provide a nice challenge and a new string to my bow. I quickly discovered however, that nearly all online documentation and forum discussion about Unity references C# scripts rather than visual graphs. This meant that if I tried to implement something I was unfamiliar with, I had to find a C# script that had the effect I was looking for, manually translate it into a visual graph with the same effect and then modify it for my existing code. This greatly slowed down my progress and so after getting the character movement working with visual script, I scrapped it and started again with C#. I have a lot of experience with the language and with Unity thankfully, so I very quickly got the movement back up and running again, better than it was before. Here is a short video of the player character running and jumping around.
Comments