Aiku is Columbia College Chicago's Large Team game for 2018. I am very proud of how what our team achieved with this project.
I was the gameplay programmer working on the Trevor level. My contribution to the game was the GMD (Geological Manipulation Device) idea and implementation.
I also did much of the scripting for the level. I came up with the idea for the GMD early on in the school year and it has become an essential aspect of the game since then.
I have done all of the scripting for the GMD. This includes picking up objects, grappling to other objects, scoping in and out,
and highlighting objects that can be interacted with the GMD. Getting all of this to work was pretty tricky. At first I tried to
use Unity's physics to move objects around, but all of the objects would orbit the point that I wanted them to go. So instead I
used Slerping to smoothly move objects to the desired location.
For the grappling functionality at first I tried to simply move the player to the desired location, however this worked a little
too well and the player would get pulled inside the object the player was grappling to. I needed to offset this a little bit so
what I did was essentially draw a line from the player to the object, normalized that value, and used that to determine what
percentage of the distance to the object the player would travel. For example, if you set the value to 0.75, the player would
travel 75% of the way to the object. I realize that this solution is a little unorthodox, but it worked perfectly well for our needs.
For the scope highlight functionality I created an array of all of the objects that were able to interact with the GMD and turned
the emission of each object up and changed their color when the player scopes in. When the player scopes out, I just set the emission
value very low and change the color back to what it was.
I have learned a lot from this project, such as how to lerp objects and how to use events. Both the scope and the GMD script send
out an event to trigger certain things in the level, such as picking up the crystals in the cave. I am certain that this knowledge will help me in future projects.
You can download the game now at our website!