Questions we want to answer during prototyping.

1.  Why do we use controllers?
2.  How will we make the sumos ‘fatter’?
3.  Is our core mechanic fun to play?
4.  How will the controls work?
5.  How will we implement the fighting mechanics?
6.  Which camera view will we use?
7.  How are we going to place our objects?

Answers we found,

• Multiple players on 1 keyboard severely limits the amount of actions a player can do if you don’t want to make it annoying to play.
• By resizing the player. We can use a shader which extrudes the vertices of a mesh by their normals
• We are going to use the left stick to turn our character around in the world and move our player.
• The "fighting mechanic" isn't really a fighting mechanic. You will be able to throw each other and push each other out of the arena.
• The Camera position will be around the 45 degrees to get the perfect angle to view most of the map.
• We will use a cannon that will be in the background of the game. These will shoot different types of elements onto the playing field. You can pick these up and become thicker or thinner. There well be rocks falling from the air and you can pick these up and throw them towards the other sumo.

Problems we ran into.

Found a different tutorial about how to implement multiple controllers. We needed to change the code three times because it didn’t work. Mostly because he recognised all the controllers as one controller.

We tried to use the shader on only a few bones of a rigged model. Unfortunately we couldn't get this to work as you can't assign materials to bones in Unity (which makes sense).  

There where different types of movement. Initially we used the addForce function of rigidbody in Unity but  this produced some wonky results (see below) so we are now using MoveTo() which leads to much steadier movement.

There were some problems with the controller. If we switched the left arm and the right arm, unity thought that the two players where one. 

What worked and what didn’t?

After getting to know that we can move our object in different ways we got the best movement for our game. 

We will shoot our objects out of cannons by adding a force at an angle so  they'll arrive at a position on the playground.  So the players will be able to interact with these objects. For example they will be able to pick up a rock and throw it at the other sumo.

Picking up and throwing the other sumo seems like a fun mechanic which can result in some funny ragdolls but could also become overpowered very quickly. We need to constrain the usage of this ‘ability’ a lot otherwise players will just constantly try to pick up and throw the other players out of the ring. We could do this by putting a timer on it, by looking at the mass of each sumo and only if the difference between the two is very large the 'fat' one could pick the small one up.

What is our plan for next week?

The goal for the next week is to start our actual game. We are going to make the basic movement to the characters. So at the end of theweek we want to be able to move in the game.  We will also set up an extensive planning on Hacknplan dividing the tasks that need to be done between our team members.