This Week
Throughout this week, I continued to work on adding controller support to the game. I finished up the button functionality in the main overworld, but that didn’t come without it’s issues. There were some problems with the Start button on the Xbox controller not pausing the game, and the B button not always cancelling, but thankfully that issue was solved rather quickly. It turned out that a naming discrepancy between Unity’s Input System, Otto’s Player Input script and the ORK Framework was to blame. Once this issue was fixed, the game was able to be played almost completely using a controller.
However, I also noticed that the menus, specifically in bouts were more designed to be used by moving the mouse to select specific actions. After “Abilities” were selected, for example, a controller wouldn’t recognize that a new menu had opened with Otto’s abilities, and continue to scroll throughout the bout wheel. After some testing and discussion with Daye, we determined that the best way to fix this issue on controller was to go into ORK Framework and find out what menu button was the “first selected”. This was originally tested on the main menu screen, which can now be fully accessed by a controller. From here, I was able to make the controller recognize the newly opened sub-menu in bouts, allowing for Otto’s abilities to be selected. All that’s left is to make sure that jokes can work, but it seems like it will be a similar solution.
Plans for Next Week
As I finish up with the controller support, I plan to move on to a new task entirely. Daye asked me to create idle cycles for the Speaker enemies in the basement of Otto’s house. I’m going to work on creating a natural looking idle behavior for them, so that they walk around in a small path to make them feel “alive”, and part of the world.
This Week's Media
This week’s piece of media that I saw was the new Animal Crossing: New Horizons Direct. I loved playing Animal Crossing, especially when it first came out during the first quarantine in March 2020. Since completing my island that summer though, I’ve barely gone back to the game. However, this new update adds a ton of new features and is definitely going to bring me back to my island. The update, which releases on 11/5 adds in a ton of NPCs from previous games like Brewster and Kappn, as well as new clothing, furniture, and brand new gameplay mechanics. While Nintendo also released content through a paid DLC, everything added in the free update is more than enough to make me want to come back to the game. I just hope my villagers aren’t too mad that I’ve been gone for so long!
