CAGD 470 - Blog Post 2 - 9/28/2025

    One more sprint down, and now I know why all my producers in the past have always been so stressed, especially at the beginning of the project. Our kick off was a little rocky mainly because I was laying the tracks in front of the train and I did just do it again this kick off and it is not fun at all, so I did sit down with my designer so that I can get a much better understanding of the game and so we can brainstorm everything that will need to be worked on and get the backlog figured out. Enough of that though back to sprint 2, we started very slow as some members have had some other classes they were working on and one of my programmers was sick and was unable to get work done but he did dial it in the last couple days of the sprint and was able to make up for that lost time which was awesome but also a little concerning because that was a lot of work for such a little amount of time. I will say, though, I do need to be better at checking in on everyone and seeing how everything is going because I did assume that he was working on it for a couple of days and then started to get worried after it was too late. If I had been checking in earlier, I could have taken on some of his work so that it would not be so much when he got better.

    Other than that, and some producer stuff, I did work on getting a jump particle to go with the double jump movement feature we have in the game. I decided to make it look like a little burst of energy and had it keep the same visual aesthetic that the dash visual effect has. To accomplish the look I went into photoshop and came up with a few sketches of what the individual particles would look like and then I took them into unity and plugged it into their particle system, from there I had a few adjustments to the setting that I needed to change because I needed it to be a lot of particles sent out in a short amount of time.

    Once I finished the particle effect, I worked on implementing both of them into the game. Doing so was just turning them on and off at the right time, as well as playing them when I needed them to play. For the dash, I had it turn off on start, then when the dash ability would be called, it would turn on and then off shortly after. I did this because, unlike the jump effect, the dash is a trail renderer, so I cannot just play it from the start because it needs to be on only for around a second.

    Lastly was implementing the jump effect which was only giving me issues because I did not want it to move after be played, I wanted it to play at the feet where the player double jumped to give off the look that the player used a burst of energy as a platform to jump off of again or the energy was used to launch the player higher up into the air. What I ended up doing in the end was making the particle system a prefab and having it spawn in an instance of it at the feet, and then after a few seconds, the instance would be destroyed so that it would take up any extra memory, because the last thing we need is 100 instances of the effect because they never got destroyed.