Breach - Week 16 Development Blog

Once again this week was spent attempting to develop the hostage enemy further based on the fact that at this point it seems that It will be contributing much larger than first expected based on the amount of development time remaining.

Firstly, made some changes regarding the enemies animations based on the fact that it seemed as though although set to "bake in pose" in Mixamo this wasn't in fact occurring. Ultimately this doesn't appear to have worked, however in general I feel as though I am left with a better suited animation for the actual hostage who at once released should run to the exit.

Alongside this, this week ultimately saw the start of the development of my voice command system. Whilst in the week prior I established a debug to test that it was working, this week was spend further developing the code. By the end of the week I had implemented the following code scripts in the project; HostageVoiceCommand, HostageController and VoiceMovement. I feel as though this puts myself in a strong position to continue developing the system in the upcoming weeks and to hopefully result in a successful end product.

One final implementation that was made and ultimately removed was the baking of a navmesh. The intended use of this was to allow the hostage to have some form of pathfinding in order for them to escape the level once released. This ultimately caused some issues with my players movement scripts and would have caused more trouble than the benefits are worth.

Upon reflection for this week I feel as though I am making some good progression in regards to the hostage enemy function. Whilst it is not finished yet and there is undoubtedly much more to add on to what I have I feel as though the progress in which I am making are positive steps in the right direction. In addition to this I feel as though I have showed strong problem solving skills in regards to how I have dealt with errors regarding the hostage enemy. This can be most notably seen in the handling of the hostage animation errors which I was getting, with animations and timing not working as intended. I was able to locate the issue and fix it for the time being by baking the animation into pose in Mixamo and then importing the animation to Unity in comparison to doing it directly in the engine.

Next week I plan to continue working on the hostage enemy. This will most likely focus around setting up a hostage navigation system based on the fact that the navmesh attempt didn't work during this week and also further work on the animation system as although in a working state there are still potential optimisations to be made.