2/19-3/12: Bug Fixing and Art Integration
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past week. Here are my updates:
Player Animation Integration (4 hours)
I was tasked with integrating the player’s walk, idle, and slash animations onto the player character. The task ended up much harder than I expected because of how animations work. The player has four different directions that they can be facing, which means four different sprites. Each sprite has its own skeleton for skeletal animation. Using a blend tree causes multiple skeletons to be active at once, leading to a lot of visual errors.
To fix it, I had to ensure the animator didn’t blend the animations, I created a custom script to call the animations. This script, which exerted manual control over them, ensured that animations don’t overlap, but took a lot of time to make work.
Bug Fixes (7 hours)
In addition to art integration, much of my stability week was focused on bug fixes. The bugs I fixed this week are:
Fixed a bug where Level 1 Checkpoints did not work. This took 2 hours of debugging, but there were multiple compounding issues. Teleporting the player does not work because the Physics2D function used does not work when a collider is between the current position and the intended position. The default checkpoint (i.e. the checkpoint at the start) was overriding the saved checkpoint, so both issues had to be fixed.
Fixed a bug where the player could dash through a single tile of wall. This involved making the player use a raycast to check if the dash is valid before starting it.
Fixed a bug where pressing “New Game” sends players to the saved checkpoint instead of the start of the game. This was fixed by having the “New Game” option explicitly delete the save file (which will be refactored with more options in Sprint 3).
Fixed a bug where stopping the Time Slow ability did not stop the stamina drain. This involved calling a function to stop the stamina drain.
Fixed a bug where the sword reflect upgrade works before buying it. This is because all the player upgrade start as purchased rather than not purchased.
Fixed various null reference exceptions to improve performance
Fixed a bug where the player’s movement will be restricted when moving along said wall. This involved changing the size of the player collider to better indicate wall placement.
Fixed a bug where arrow trap projectiles pass through walls. This involved making the projectiles destroy themselves when colliding with a wall.
Fixed a bug where players on keyboard need to use the joystick to move (if a controller is plugged in but not active). This required me to use Unity’s method of looking for the active device rather than my own.
Fixed a bug where the player’s gun does not save between scenes. This functionality never existed, so I made it.
Repository Management (5 hours)
I spent a lot of my time on maintaining the repository, which involves merging pull requests, fixing Merge Conflicts, and hotfixing the build when needed. I merged in 95 pull requests during these three weeks (audio not included, as Gibby does most of that), which might be a new record for two weeks of development (it does include spring break). Much of that time was spent fixing merge conflicts, which were more time consuming than normal due to the amount of changes to scenes. Solving these conflicts involved advanced techniques, such as using transfer prefabs. Overall, the negative impact of merge conflicts on the team were mitigated.
Programming Meetings and Office Hours (3 hours)
A lot of my time this week has been spent in meetings. There are two types of meetings:
The weekly all-hands meetings. This is where every programmer is required to come every week to meet with their squads and then meet with me to discuss their tasks for the week. These meetings can go on for two hours, as there are a lot of things to discuss and the teams are large. During these meetings, I go through my members one by one, discuss what they talked about in their squad meetings, and ensure they have good tasks.
Office Hours. These are a type of optional, opt-in work sessions that I host once a week for an hour. These are places where programmers can go to get help or work collaboratively. Only a few programmers have taken advantage of this, and I hope more do. I only hosted one this sprint, as I had to cancel the one on February 23rd due to a blackout.