Spike's Digital Media Blog

 Now, it is mostly finishing touches towards the app and starting the presentation. After some pointers from Dean I decided to make the colours for the Colour Tags darker to stand out from the background and I also moved the Feedback and Rate Us options to a new button on the Home Menu as opposed to being sat away in the settings, hidden. I changed it later to a 'Contact Us' button though as it was not clear as to what it did. I am also going to start on working on my presentation for the assignment too, I will have to create much of the content of it after some research about user journeys and user personas and I have come up with a funding model too.

Today, I did some HTML practice with Josh just in-case I ever want to develop a website or my App for Mobile. Not sure when I will use this knowledge but I am now a certified HTML pro... 👍

At the moment we can't actually port the enemy model into the game but it's finished because we can't apply animations on mixamo and therefore can't create a jumpscare  itself still with the code I have , the issue was spawned  from the model having way too many vertices for how simplistic it was and the issue still hasn't been resolved. I tried to explain that we could still use the enemy model but just have it float along to chase the player which could still look scary, like the 'Nightmare' enemy from F.E.A.R. but Jim was all like 'No no, we'll fix it.' And as usual I asked How? and if he was going to do it and as usual, it was 'I don't know' and 'No'.

Today I worked on creating a tag system in the Ditu app and visualising it. I have it so a date on the calendar has a day and a time, customisable in a pop-up menu along with a system to add tags and a description, there is also a separate Tag creator menu too because of their importance to categorising apps. I also made a page for cataoguing dates under 3 sections of recurring, upcoming and expired dates, the recurring feature will be shown on a screen that cannot be added because this is just a prototype. The hardest part of making this system in the protoype was trying to logicaaly plan out the flow of everything because it is all welll and good saying, 'Oh yes I'll make a Tag and Date creation system which factors in all these different variables' but actually creating it you need to be very methodical and logical which was a difficult juxtaposition to make in my head compared to anything I've done before in this project, there was just that extra layer of 'is t...

 Lots and lots of progress today. Primarily it was working to get the enemy functioning with assistance from Josh, so now it freezes when shone on by the flashlight and chases the player when it is not, because it is temperamental still, I shall go with the decision to add walls that only the player can climb so the navmesh which defines the explorable area for the enemy is smaller and I will have the same enemy duplicated 3 times and separated into their own separate section of the level.  but I also started adding trees to my level, invisible walls and also refining the mountain terrain. I also tried adding a translucent yellow cylinder for the checkpoint asset but as usual it crashed the editor. Big whoop dee doo surprise... After rebooting, it worked and there is now a functioning checkpoint system. Because of how we set up the checkpoints as objects the player teleports to, they can be easily adjusted in regards to game balance or if we decide to change the level.

  22/11/2023 Today I added menus and an actual model for the batteries, courtesy of Jimmy, which now functions properly as well as a pause menu. UNFORTUNATELY, Github didn't upload the changes when I pushed them and I lost a days progress, lovely... 27/11/2023 Today, I added menus again and also started clearing up the landscape, making it more even for the purposes of placing objects, the menus now all function within the game and I also added a 'Goal' object from an actor that when the player collides with it, it sends the player to a 'Thanks for Playing' Screen. On a personal note, I'm a little concerned with Jimmy and Mo's work progress, but only one of us can really code the game because of Github's utter uselessness but they don't really seem omotivated to do ANYTHING for the project, which honestly I expected with them having a break every 5minutes but it is what it is. I'm also losing the will to live over Unreal crashing the entire PC ev...

  There has been lots of progress today as you can see from the screenshot, I have added a clock to the Home Page after my dad told me he liked having a physical clock on his phone which is easier to read than the one that is always on screen on Android/ Apple due to his poor Reading vision, aside from that, i added functionality to the settings with sliders and pop-ups which will take you out of the app to go to the app store for a review and Feedback which will take you to your Phone's default email app. I also refined the calendar page by adding more details and showing where interactive buttons would go to navigate between dates and show events on the selected date. Here is both states of the animated slider button