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Final Adjustments, Project Feedback & Future Ambitions

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Final Adjustments: Before the vertical slice of Peanut Gallery can be presented there were first many changes that needed to be made. Not all of the following changes required any code to function, however they each required knowledge of the Unity engine to transfer into the project. The first adjustment was adding a jump animation to ‘Eric’ the elephant in the ‘Peanut Run’ minigame. This animation was scripted into a ground checking script that would monitor the state of the elephant. If the elephant is touching the ground, the running animation would be looping, if the elephant is no longer touching the ground, the following jump animation will play. Eric the Elephant Jump Animation Created by Kalil. The second adjustment was a randomization script for alternating advertisement prefabs. This script randomly cycles the image of the advertisement at the base of the ‘Peanut Drop’ minigame. This creates a more interactive and refreshing feel when replaying the game. The third adjustment ...
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Minigame 3 - Peanut Run

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Concept play and mechanics: This minigame was structured freely, allowing for alterations in its early stages of development. At first, the game was going to be played out as a level-based runner game where the player would move the elephant’s trunk up and down to suck up water and put out fires (Ads). This later changed to a more straight forward endless runner approach that would be fun and repayable. The gameplay concept for this minigame would play out much like Google’s Dinosaur Game , where the elephant will run in a straight line and obstacles will appear in its path that the player must jump over. To add some flair and to further reinforce our project’s educational purpose, the elephant will have to close incoming ads by shooting peanuts at them.  Snippet of gameplay from Google’s ‘Dinosaur Game’. The core minigame mechanics can be broken down as follows:   Obstacles spawn and move toward the player, continuing off the screen.   When the player touches the ‘ju...
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Minigame 2 - Peanut Shoot

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Concept play and mechanics:  Much like the concept and mechanics process for the ‘Peanut Drop’ minigame, it was important to gain an understanding of the minigames gameplay and to break down the core mechanics that would be required for a successful testing. Andy was able to make an animation for the ‘Peanut Shoot’ minigame much like he did before.  Andy’s ‘Peanut Shoot’ Gameplay Concept Animation. The animation above breaks down as follows:   The trunk at the bottom of the screen rotates ~30 ° from left to right.    A crosshair follows where the trunk is pointing.    When the player touches the screen, a peanut is fired out of the trunk.    A peanut is removed from the peanuts reserve display.    The peanut strikes the target in line with where the crosshair was when the player touched the screen.   The impact leaves behind an imprint that shows the player where they hit.    If the player hits the ‘X’ (Bullseye), a ...
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Minigame 1 - Peanut Drop

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File Setup, Touch Controls and Mobile Device Simulation: As the lead programmer of the Peanut Gallery project, it was important to ensure a Bitbucket repository was made that each team member could access if needed. As only two members (Andy and I) need direct access to the file at this time, we took charge on piecing a Unity file together and uploading it to the repository. My experience using Unity and C# is currently limited and diving into the project without background research was unrealistic and potentially dangerous to future development if dealt with poorly. I began by researching touch controls and mobile simulators as these are the most important core requirements for the project. Touch controls turned out to be far more difficult than I had anticipated. After a number of days researching alternate methods and testing code from S tack Overflow and the official Unity forum, I successfully implemented touch capabilities using Unity’s new input system. This required me to cre...
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