Complete Prototype

This week we completed our prototype! Our first 'playable' level is complete. The level consists of two sources of different colored balls that must cross paths to get to their respective sinks. The conveyor belt object is pretty much complete but might need some fine tuning to get the physics of the collisions just right.

Big changes this week

• Physics
• Tweaking the balls friction, angular inertia, bounciness, and mass. This took a considerable amount of time to get it to feel natural and look like a real physics system.
• Conveyor belt surface effecter was tweaked so that it would perform correctly with the new physics of the balls. We ran into an annoying issue where the force on the ball would cause a so much rotational back spin that ball would move in the opposite direction. Right now everything is working satisfyingly except that ball still rotates the incorrect direction when on the conveyor.
• Balls
• The new artwork with the X means that you can now tell more clearly when the ball is spinning. This makes the motion of the ball a little bit more satisfying.
• Ghosting: The balls now leave a fading trail behind them as they progress.
• Conveyor Gizmo
• A directional arrow to switch the conveyor's force direction
• Can now be added to the seen from the UI bar
• Gameplay
• A play button that will drop balls. In the future I think we are going to go with a 'Drop Ball' button that will drop a single ball rather than just start a continuous flow.
• Restart button that replays the scene. This is mainly for our testing sanity but this will also restart the level for the player.
• Two game cycles: BUILD and PLAY
• During the build cycle you can add, rotate, and re-position gizmos. During the play cycle, balls will fall and editing the scene is disabled.
• UI
• Drag and drop Gizmo prefabs and place them in the scene. This is a bit tricky... still working on it.

Planned changes for next week

• Second Gizmo: the wall
• Ball effects: impact collision effect
• UI: Fully working UI toolbar with drag and drop abilities
• Icons for the already present Gizmos
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