Everything is connected to everything else.


Rule #1 of tuning a race car.  Everything is connected to everything else.  You can't just increase your horsepower without adjusting your suspension.  You can't make suspension adjustments without thinking about your tyre pressures.  A race car is a system and works as an integrated system.  Whatever changes you make to one part of the car will have an effect on every other part of the car.

Game development is the same.  Every system is connected to every other system.  I made a change to what I thought was an unrelated script to anything else in the game.  That was a mistake, and as a weekend racer, I should have known better. (No, not on the streets. The SCCA is a wonderful place to fulfill your need for speed.)  Adding in the code to make exploding lava balls and then attempting to clean up what I thought was some unrelated but messy code, I ended up breaking my moving platforms, but not all of them all at once. 

Back in the olden times before fancy development environments with fancy debuggers and whatnot, we had the good old-fashion PRINT() statement.  I still use this with some of my Fortran code I use in my space science research. (Yes, Fortran is still a thing. Shut up.)  Turns out this is exactly the thing I needed, along with temporarily making the variables in my spline code public so I could watch their values change in the Unity editor.  Ok, well, it wasn't exactly a print() statement, it was Debug.Log(), but same diff.  

Once I could see that my character was colliding with the platform's trigger volume and that information was getting to the spline script, I noticed some odd behaviour in my elapsed time and my spline parameter, t.  (If you want to learn more about the mathematics of splines, check out my LERPS and Spline Demo.)  Upon resetting the level, I wasn't resetting the spline parameters correctly and thus getting platforms that were stuck in one position.  

I think this platformer is close to being done.  As best as I can understand from the assignment requirements, it meets all of the requisite minimum criteria.  I'm sure there are other features, timing, and geometry that I could polish, and I will do over the coming few days, but this should be near the game's final form.  Let me know if you find anything out of sorts, any bugs, or simply anything that could be executed better.

Files

FireMonkeyPanic_PC-BUILD_v0-4-2.zip 141 MB
Apr 27, 2021
FireMonkeyPanic_WEB-BUILD_v0-4-2.zip Play in browser
Apr 27, 2021

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