Week 2

What we've been working on

This week the Flow team has been working on integrating the UI bar, finishing off our first Gizmo, tweaking physics between game objects, and fine tuning the mouse interaction.

The conveyor belt

The conveyor belt Gizmo is now fully skinned and animated. Art was originally created for several different frames of the conveyor belt to show the spinning movement of the belt. However, we quickly realized that a simple script could alleviate a lot of the art work needed while also making the animation much smoother. So rather than having different images each frame, the conveyor belt is static but has moving parts that are transformed in unity with a rotation script. This makes the belt look much more fluid and saves some time on Art

Physics enhancements

We noticed that despite unity having most of the physics already built in, our system needed some tweaking. For example, our balls were using circle colliders and rigidbodies which gives them most of the effects needed. However, we noticed that balls would sometimes stack one on top of another in a big perfect pile. Such a thing would normally be fairly unlikely in the real world given perfectly round balls. We solved this by removing the frictional forces on the balls and adding bouncing and elastic collision effect. This small force exerted on other balls plus the lack of friction gives the balls a much more realistic effect when colliding with other objects in the scene. The bouncing is also satisfying and will be nice for future use when we implement obstacles like walls.

Mouse Interaction

You can now click to rotate and re-position objects in the scene. We encountered a small problem that allows us to position Gizmos on-top of other Gizmos despite the objects having colliders. Hopefully we can get this issue solved relatively quickly and get back to the development schedule.

UI toolbar

The goal is to have a small vertical bar on the right hand side that has icon representations of Gizmos that can be placed in the scene. As with such a task, screen ratio, and dynamic sizing are a bit of pain to get working on all screen formats.

Next week plans

• Wiring the UI toolbar to the mouse interaction
• Start work on next gizmo
• Level design of the first few levels
• Ball effects (trails and collisions)