Game Scene Final Project Post

Our project was based on Uncharted 4 A Thief's End, but we also pulled some inspiration from the other Uncharted games. We wanted to do A Thief’s End in Uncharted 4 because of the giant ship in the level that we wanted as our centerpiece. What we went for was a sort of ambiance when traveling through the caves with both of them being a little dark as there are no light sources in them besides the torches in the first tunnel and the flashlight or lantern that you can find outside of the caves. In Uncharted you play as a treasure hunter and so we tried capturing the same feeling that you would get by adding in a rope swing mechanic to challenge the player on whether or not they can even make it to the cave. The story behind our scene was supposed to be a lone treasure hunter that was searching through a small cave and finds a little bit of treasure but then continues to find the real treasure was hidden behind another set of secret doors where they will then find more jewels, gold, coins, as well as a lost pirate ship that is stuck inside the cave on some rocks and is unable to get out. 

Some problems that were happening personally with programming were the pickup script and the rope swing script. The pickup was giving me problems because when applying it to an object that does not have a light source and does not need one it would cause issues in the game that made it so it was unable to run. Luckily the easy fix I found was just making another script that does the same thing but just doesn't have the light source part associated with the script. The rope swing was giving me problems because if you were to grab it from any direction and started to swing back and forth it would start to add momentum to other directions and we did not want that to happen, so what I ended up doing was freezing it so you couldn't go left or right but then the camera would also start to spin so I had to freeze that as well. Lastly what would happen is the swing and release were way too inconsistent to have in the game so what I did to fix that was added in a landing spot that the player would teleport to once you grab the rope, but the player's body would be invisible and the camera would be locked onto the rope giving the illusion that you are swing on the rope. The downside to this was that it made the letting go of the rope a little weird as you wouldn't see your character jump off and land and you would seem to just appear there.

Lastly, one of the group issues that occurred was that we took a while to finally get into Unity. Since the start of the project around the last two weeks I was the only one in Unity and that's because I was dealing with coding the game and all the interactions we have in it. The second person only came into Unity with two weeks left because he was implementing the water system for the level but then he left right after that. The main issue was that we were waiting for everything to finish before moving it into Unity, but I told people that it would be easier to start getting the layout of the scene done as soon as possible because the only thing that was left for models and texture were small props.