Work Post

11:19am - Okay I have the rest of today free, to work on my Extra Credits Game Jam 3 game, or whatever. And of course now that I'm up, I don't feel like doing it. Hah.

Still, I at least want to see what my bicycle man looks like animated at this point. So let's try checking that out and see if it gets the ball rolling.

11:42am - Alright I've got my bicycleman animated and he looks okay.

The next logical step is to make him a physical thing and put him on a platform. I'm still not feeling excited to be working on this though. Shoot. I kinda want to go back to bed and lay down for a few hours doing nothing, but that's not very useful.

3:41pm - So I ended up laying down after all, and I had a heckin' good nap. So that's something.

4:32pm - Put some colliders on my Player and a Rigidbody2D so now he's falling from heaven, gotta make a platform for him to land on.

4:37pm - Platform created. Now I've got an physical but non moving bicycle that's animated.

Now then, how to move him?

Normally I make platformers where you've got lots of movement options, but this is supposed to be an infinite runner, right? So you can't stop. Maybe make it a one button interface, where you press to do a sick jump with your bike, like in Canabalt. Or maybe you can speed up and slow down but not stop, since bicycles fall down if you stop?

Hmm... I haven't played many infinite runners besides Canabalt, so I don't know what the usual thing to do is.

I think I want the threat of crashing but I don't want the constant speed up of Canabalt. So I'll try using Unity physics and see what I get.

4:58pm - Okay after messing with the physics a little I think I'll have the player control the rotation of the bike so that they can steady themselves after a jump. If they don't manage it, they'll crash and game over.

There's one big problem I've got now though. I'm hungry, and without Rob here to share them with I don't want to make hamburgers. So, I'm thinking of packing up my stuff and going to the McDonalds to work.

5:03pm - Yeah I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna go to McDonalds. Just watch me. Here I go. Yeah!

Work Post

5:37pm - I don't know what it is but something has felt wrong since before I left my apartment, and it's making it hard to concentrate on my project. Alas, I will continue.

6:05pm - I've finished my meal and looked at Reddit a bit, but I'm having trouble engaging myself in game development.

I'm not entirely sure what to do just now, so let's pause and reflect and think about all of it.

So, I've got my BicycleMan, and he goes. But the go script doesn't try to maintain a speed, it just pushes him faster and faster. That'd be fine if I was trying to copy Canabalt but I already decided I wasn't.

I think part of the problem is that I'm forcing the bike to go right, instead of forward. If I make it go forward though, it might take off like a rocket when it hits a jump. XD

It's already under the force of gravity though so I'm not sure about that.

I also need to make it so that it only goes forward when the back wheel is touching the ground.

I'm fully capable of all of this but I'm feeling like I really don't want to do it.

What do I want to do? Maybe work on Maple's Key some more, maybe my AI Projects, maybe just go home and play video games... Most of those options are also complex game development tasks, so why not just do this?

Maybe I just don't want to do the Extra Credits Game Jam 3 anymore? Geez, I don't know. :/


7:05pm - Well I ended up continuing work on my EXGJ3 project, but I'm a bit stuck trying to figure out how to translate the rotation of the bike into X and Y for the force push.

7:11pm - Oh so it was just as easy as switching transform.forward for transform.right

Welp.

7:53pm - It took some doing but I got the bike to only go right when the back wheel is touching ground, and it seems much better now. It also stops moving if the driver's head hits the ground, in case the bike gets flipped. That'll trigger my gameover state later but for now it just deactivates itself and the BicycleDriver components.

The next things I need to do are add a Jump button, so that there's some player input, and then rotation keys for air control.

8:08pm - Yeah I'm spent for right now. I'm going to head home and see if I want to work any more when I get there.