Collision Conundrum

This week I decided to try using some of the things I learned in last week's game jam. The team also did a presentation to the university course this week. Our artist Connor did a great splash for the opening slide, seen in the above image, which he intends to take further for future use!

Collision
I began by changing my current code to work with Unity rigidbody components so I could get better collision for free. The current collision doesn't work well in certain situations so that is why I wanted to change it. This solution would work by applying my velocity calculations to a rigidbody rather than the position of a gameobject. It seemed simple but I'll be honest, this did not go well. There are a multitude of reasons for this, one being that I would still have to use raycasts for mechanics such as detecting whether the player can wall jump. So I had to resolve my dodgy collision by improving the raycast system I already have. 

I spent a day on improving the system and I finally had something that worked well for the player. Then I tested it on one of the sharks... It worked great at first. I noticed the sharks were getting stuck on the floor whenever they tried to climb a wall with their head against it. It seemed I had made the raycasting positions too close to the edge of each physics object that it was vertically colliding against a wall, essentially gluing the object to the wall (This is the conclusion I came too after being unable to find the actual cause of the problem). Reverting to the old collision system fixed this and unfortunately I had to do this to capture up to date GIFs for a presentation the team did for the uni course. At this point I lost all motivation to continue fixing the collision so moved on. (I will return to it as this is a part of the game that must be resolved)

The presentation we did went quite well and we got some good feedback from audience questions. One piece of feedback was that there is currently no way to distinguish which enemy you are infesting in the game. We do have concepts for what this will look like so I began implementing it in unity. As I was making the changes, I realised that the concept ideas might not provide enough visual information to the player about which creature they are infesting, especially when surrounded by other creatures. I have added a blob style outline, using the same metaballs method as I did for the player visuals, to highlight the creature better. I am unsure whether this works very well as I haven't tested it much but it definitely makes the creature more visible. 

Other than that I've just been cleaning up the code. I know there wasn't much to show but the collision conundrum took up most of the development time this week so hopefully I will have more to show in the next post.

I hope you are enjoying this devlog, don't forget to comment if you have any feedback and share if you like it!