Tyler Roman - Dev Log #01

For this initial dev log, just wanted to talk about some of the aspects of the game. The sprites (though I had created some basic sprites that were later improved upon/replaced with Vera's higher quality sprite work), concept,  and mechanics have mostly been decided upon by the lead designer Vera, while its been much of an honor to support from a coding, game design, bug fixing, and level design aspect. For this dev log first, I'll talk about the issue of the instancing of the mech's health. 

#1

Every time the mech would take damage, it would properly record the damage and reset the game upon "dying",  however when the player turns back into the corgi and then back into a mech, the mechs health would reset back to full instead of properly saving.  After working and thinking about the issue in different ways that weren't working and doing some further research, the solution was to implement the health of the mech as global variable in a different object within the level and have the changes that occur in the mech update upon that stored variable thus fixing the issue. 

#2

The other notable issue was the presence of a few bugs, there were difficulties with the collisions of the corgi, Tater, and the terrain, where they would get stuck in terrain and could not move or jump. This eventually was found to be because the boxes around the sprites were too large and after testing the theory by  self shortening the boxes, Vera went ahead and better updated the sprites and that seemed to fully resolved most of the collision errors involving Tater. However, there were still issues with the mech getting caught into the terrain when transforming, I thought that this could be solved using a point_in_circle type function that would detect when a wall was too close to the corgi. But upon further testing from Vera,  she ended up solving it using a point_meeting check instead. She allowed the corgi to transform irregardless of space, but if the mech was in contact with a wall, it would immediately transform back giving the appearance that the corgi simply failed to transform. Other bugs included, a bug that would keep the mech as it was a persistent object so then in the next level there would be a mech and a corgi.