It’s been a productive week as I’ve had a ton of spare time to work on Plunder Pups! Here’s a general overview of what’s been done:

-Finally found my controllers, which allowed me to continue controller implementation.
-Set-up all controllers to work with the Unity Input Manager.
-Fixed a bug where the player could start the running animation while the game was counting down.
-Fixed a bug that did not allow the player to unpause whilst using a mouse and keyboard configuration.
-Implemented controller support to a satisfying degree. Assigning a control scheme to each player is yet to be implemented.
-Fixed various issues where menu items were not becoming highlighted.
-Began FMOD implementation for when sounds are added.
-Began adding functionality to allow picking the number of human players and setting up the game from there.

I’m pretty happy with the amount of work that was done while I had a bit of time off from my day job, and I learned a few things along the way! I would say the biggest lesson I learned this past week or so was that once a game has gotten past the prototype stage, controller functionality should be high on the list of priorities. The game now feels all round better to play with the inclusion of controller support, which would have helped with internal testing.

REEVALUATING GOALS AND MILESTONES FOR RELEASES

This past week has given me a good idea of how much I’ll realistically be able to work on the game until the end-of-June deadline. Realistically, I’m going to have to push back a few things and prioritize other features. I don’t believe that the AI states will be complete in 15 days, which is a bummer, but it’s one of the less notable things in the game thus far. There are still obviously a lot of bugs happening with the AI, so those will need to be cleaned up before additional states are considered whatsoever.

On the topic of notable things, the game world is looking a little dull. I want to look into free models or possibly asking peers about small modelling jobs, in particular for the fences and “nests” (which I want to restyle into dog kennels). Additionally, the game is still completely devoid of sound, and while I could probably get away with releasing a new, “stable” build of the game at the end of the month without music, I don’t think sound can be omitted.

These are just a few of the things that I’m currently contending with, so it’s going to be a hard race to the finish to complete things to a satisfactory degree by the end of the month. It’s likely that I may end up having to cut various features, unfortunately, but that’s game development!

Thanks for reading!