Dev Log #5 (June 13th-19th)

For this week's build, we aimed to implement our second tool, the Knitting Needle. It was an important focus of our sprint, as it was intended to be part of the main gameplay loop. 

The way the Knitting Needle is intended to function was for it to be a “distraction” tool. The player character would be able to throw the knitting needle in the cardinal and intercardinal directions. If the needle hits a wall, it would get lodged and create a line of yarn following it. A cat would spawn and chase the line of yarn, creating a distraction. As the cat passes by, guards would look at it and follow along, deviating off their intended pathways.

For this, we gave the player controller the feature to be able to spawn and throw Knitting Needles. After the Knitting Needle collides with a “wall” object, it spawns the Cat, which follows a path of between the player’s original location and the location of the Knitting Needle. The cat, once it reaches its destination, waits for a few seconds before coming back, giving the player some leeway. After the cat returns to the player’s original position, the cat and the Knitting Needle are both despawned and the player is allowed to shoot another Knitting Needle. 

The guard’s AI had to be adjusted to respond to this behavior as well, turning off the grandma’s ability to be detected while in their sight and following the cat object once it entered a certain radius. Additionally, as our HUD only had utility for the Yarn Trap tool implemented, we had to reformat the HUD to include the Knitting Needle as well. We reused the cat asset from our original concept. The cat was modeled, textured, rigged, and implemented in-game. Other models like the Granny model were also implemented, alongside placeholder guard textures.

As many of our team was busy this week, our sprint was intended to be very focused as to not overscope and not push our members on deadlines. We had completed our intended tasks with the mechanical progression of our game, as our two biggest player mechanics are implemented at this time (at least in their base form). We still need to create more assets and implement them, and also create our next levels.