Day 3 Update:
A bit of progress but knew it wasnt going to be great this past 24 hours. Friday night was busy with social stuff and Saturday morning I caught up on some sleep.
But first up for Day 3 I added some more constraints to the custom character control system Im developing here to get some playable platforming. Previously jumping was very 'floaty' and you could zoom around in the air like a rocket. Now its much more constrained, and so you can control the Shiba on both air and ground a lot better - pretty important for platforming!
First basic example of platforming (no animations yet but ill get to that later in this day review, arrrgggh!):
Im constantly balancing and tweaking this stuff, but its coming along slowly into something that feels nice in terms of movement and control. Its still feeling a bit 'sticky' though, or at least the wrong kind of 'sticky', so theres some room for improvement in the coming days.
I did spend a good chunk of time in the afternoon adding a new feature - portals/triggers to move between levels and areas. This is again inspired by the way you move between levels in Banjo Kazooie (which is way more complex than I ever realized), so think of this as a budget/quick implementation of that. Pretty happy with how its turned out and I think this is as complex as Im going to go, the main thing is it will make it very easy to set up multiple levels and move between them. More details after the gifs:
^Moving from test area #1 to test area #2
^Going back from test area #2 to test area #1
You can see in the first gif the Shiba approaches the portal, and the camera snaps to a predetermined 'locked' portal viewing perspective when hes close enough to have the portal's 'attention' (this perspective is easily customized for any portal and will likely be used in other areas in the game too, to get your attention for important objects/characters/spots) then when the Shiba touches the portal (portals will be invisible in the actual game level) the game takes over control, and 'pulls' you inside. Once the portal is pulling you inside a timer starts, and after 2-3 seconds youre teleported to the next area + the camera is set to a new portal viewing location. The previous area is despawned, and the new area spawns in (this will be handy when theres a lot of items and objects in levels to keep the game running ok)
In the second gif you can see the Shiba move away from the portal, the camera 'unhooks' and goes back to a mode where you can control it. The shiba then goes back to the portal, the camera hooks back up to the portal viewing perspective, the Shiba enters the portal and teleports back to the previous portal. All the same things happen again with area #2 despawning, area 1 spawning back in, the camera doing what it needs to do etc. And this is a system that can easily be setup to work between as many portals as needed. It was a lot to plan out, but its working quite well!
The current problem:
Unfortunetly Im having some big issues with the animation system at this point also. It seems like the Blender -> Unity animation is broken in more recent versions, for well over a year now, and no ones found a solution or fixed it <___< Its not an issue Ive had before so its very frustrating that its popped up in the middle of a gamejam. Ive been struggling to fix this since Day 2, so its taken up a bit of time I could be using for other features.
But animation is very important ... I need to get it working now.
It doesnt help either that theres barely any information out there on alternatives, or what the actual issue is, let alone how to fix it. Ive tried a few different things and have a few new ideas to try out... I really need to get this sorted out asap. I cant add any other characters or animations until I get this full character development 'pipeline' working, otherwise I risk doing hours of work that will be broken and/or unable to be used.
Until then, heres the blender view of a couple of quick animations I have done and ready once this issue is sorted out, there will be a lot of tail wagging!
