Week #6: implementing the initial interaction system

Figure 1 - Preparing the interaction system for selection testing

Hello lads,

The development of the game is starting to take a quicker pace. Andreia has been busy constructing a better camera system for our game using a well know library; Rafael has been implementing behavior trees and more animations to correspond to them and, I've been developing the interaction system. This perhaps the most natural week for me to describe, although it's been the hardest to work on. 

Before implementing the interaction system, I refactored the entire project concerning the user input system. We now use version 1.0.0 of Unity's newer InputSystem instead of the Legacy system. This has the benefit of enabling even more comfortable keypress configuration and incomparable cross-platform support. It also delegates input handling in cleaner, more efficient ways. I then passed to my main task, the interaction system, lifted the requirements around it, and its purposes in our game. I first programmed an initial version of an inventory, to which I can add and remove items, but not yet visualize or select them, since that is not a priority - and it's likely not going to be anytime soon. I also wrote the interface for all interactable entities in the game and implemented the base class. Any NPC to which a player may talk to, an item he may pick or door he may open, needs to inherit from this base class and do any extensions when required. This interactable class facilitates implementing different behaviors, effects, bonuses, and penalties for interactables being interacted with. It's particularly useful to make the guards' local and global suspicions towards the player. As of right now, we have three ways for our focus group to test the interaction system; they can opt to use a ray cast selector, a proximity selector, or a cyclic selector for items that are on the ground. These resemble the pick-up mechanics found respectively in Hitman 2, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and the quick weapon switch mechanic found in any of the Counter-Strike titles.

Starting this week and going forward to the next one, I will be working on the game's UI and HUD. In particular, I will implement two different ways of presenting game objectives to the player, the menu system which was already sketched by our arts' colleagues and the interactables nearby and interactable selected highlighting and tool-tips. This plan is of course, subject to change.

See you next week,

Francisco