Development Update 1

UPDATE

With a new project, we got a chance to revamp the movement script to make it more efficient and support the movements and animations that we need. We wanted more than just the basic walk forward and walk backwards animation so we decided to have 8 direction of animation that supports the movement. An example of this is move forward towards the right. This will make the player character seem more lively and more accurate to real life. Below you can see the slight differences of the forward animations. A blend tree (System in Unity Engine) is utilized to map the different animations based on a vector to easily incorporate the animations to the actual movement of the player object.

<Forward>

<Forward Left>

<Forward Right>

We have also decided to change the animation tree to something more streamlined and less complex to understand. The new tree only routes the animation back to the empty state and instead calls the animation in the script rather than in the tree. This is a much better system because the animation tree gets complicated really quickly when having to route the animations back to other animations. It can easily cause a bug that would rather be hard to find and might not come up until later in the development. This tree is also easily expandable to add more action animations, because each animation is simply routing back to the empty state. 

CHALLENGES

A couple of bugs have come up and the most notable one was when we were first setting up the animation system. The character model at the time kept loading in fetal position and below the  ground when we first tested it. The problem seemed to stem from the model's origin position which moved the character down during run time and the fetal position seemed to be attributed to an issue with Unity's avatar system not recognizing some of the bones in the rig of the model. Adding a base animation "Idle" fixed this issue and we were able to get a model that behaved exactly how we wanted to in game. 

Other bugs we had was code related and was simply because of a miscalculation of math in code that resulted the player velocity to increase exponentially. This bug was fairly easy to find and was fixed immediately.

Going forward, I would like for all coders too properly add comments in code and write with basic coding conventions in my so everybody can read the code and understand what each line does.