Much More Satisfying Breakables

     Over the last few days I've spent some time polishing the breakable objects and removing some of the bugs I've found with them. One of my goals was to make the act and sight of the breakables much more satisfying. In addition, a delay to the fragility of the objects has been added. This gives them about a second to fall into place or correct any tiny collision overlaps, like setting a breakable on a surface that it accidentally goes into a bit or placing it just a tiny bit above the surface the asset's intended to be placed on.

     You can also see that I've added a rough UI that displays the player's current score as well as a countdown timer for how long they have to break as many objects as possible before time runs out. I decided to go with a countdown timer since part of the premise of the game is that you're a cat who's trying to break as many things as possible before getting caught.

     This means that from the moment that you break your first object the timer starts counting down to simulate one of your guardians running to see what happened. Once they get to the area you're in you can no longer break anything. Above, you can see that the "start the timer when the first object breaks" part of the countdown timer's functionality isn't added yet, but it's something I plan to add in the next day or so.

     I've also made sure to setup a basic score counter so that I can start rounding out the minimum viable product. Currently, the objects in the gif above are set to award the player 10 points when they break. That's just the default amount, but I've made sure they're easily editable in Unity's inspector. In the above gif I demonstrated this by staggering the impacts of the breakable objects to show the score increasing each time one hits the ground and breaks.

     The next steps toward completing this functionality is to add the "start the timer when the first object breaks" functionality and to add some sound to make it more auditorily satisfying, since right now the crash is just silent. There may be more things I add/change later on other than those specific things, but to avoid feature creep and keep the scope manageable I'm trying to look about one or two parts ahead per asset.

     In addition to the changes I've made with the breakable objects, I've also started making some changes to the third-person player controller. One of the more major changes is that instead of moving using transform.Translate() it now uses the Rigidbody.AddForce(). I did this to start working on a bug that causes the player to stick walls or objects they collide with while in the air. Other than that I've started greyboxing the cat's paws to allow the player to swipe objects in front of them.

     The next thing I did was create two physical materials. One for when the player is on the ground (with normal friction) and one for when they're in the air (with no friction). It's working a little better, but there's still a bug that causes the player to stick to the wall and even sort of climb it if they are continuously moving into the wall, and jumping will let you climb it. So, I've got some things to fix in regards to that. Plus, the turning is currently too fast so I need to start polishing that too.