Directorial Debut
This past week, I got a much better taste of working with timelines in Unity by making important edits to the kitchen Creeper interaction towards the beginning of the game.
Before, talking to the Creeper before getting Otto’s breakfast was optional. When the conversation with the Creeper did end, it would simply scuttle over to the hatch and disappear. Also, the buzzers that appeared for the next quest would appear after completing the breakfast quest and interacting with the Icebox, TV, and Lamp. However, we wanted the buzzers to appear when the Creeper went into the hatch, so the Creeper conversation had to happen before Otto gets breakfast.
With this, I went ahead and combined two timelines that already existed: the one that had the creeper walking over to the hatch and the one that panned the camera over to the hatch and showed the buzzers appearing from it. I decided to combine the latter into the former. However, I ran into a snag when the camera panned back over to Otto after panning to the hatch.
In the previous timeline, Otto was standing at a specific spot when this happened, so the timeline instructed the camera to pan back to that specific spot. The new timeline can be activated from a variety of places, though, because there are multiple different coordinates that Otto could be at when the dialogue with the Creeper is activated. To remedy this, I created a script that retrieves Otto’s position when the timeline called.
Look At Me When I’m Talking To You
While creating the new timeline, I also came across a recurring bug that we were aware of but hadn’t fixed yet: sometimes, at the beginning of a sequence, Otto would be facing the wrong way for one reason or another. I spent some time making sure I was familiar with Otto’s animations and wrote a reusable script that can control their animation at any point. I enjoyed experimenting with the script and deciding the best way to write it. After settling on what I believed to be the best available method, I immediately was able to implement it in several problem areas of the current build.
Next Week
I’ve been efficiently chipping away at the heap of tasks we received recently. Next week, I’ll be thinning out the herd. There are several issues that have been lower priority that I can now get to. I’m also hopeful that we’ll get around to implementing some small “cutscenes” that play when Otto does certain activities. These should hopefully make the game a bit more lively and cinematic.
Media Rec
I recently rewatched Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Much to the dismay of some of my friends, that is my favorite Star Wars movie. It got me thinking about Rian Johnson, and now I find myself thinking about Knives Out, another one of his recent masterpieces. I highly recommend watching it. Such an incredibly detailed and funny movie. Everybody in the film is brilliant. I can’t wait for Knives Out 2!
