Dev Log Week 5 - 5/2

This week, I started on two tasks that were assigned last week. The first task was to start a Unity project and work on player movement and the rotating object mechanic. I created a project using Unity 2023.2.20f1 and made a test scene. I was able to follow a tutorial to set up the player object and movement. The object is an empty parent (“Player”) that holds the scripts for movement, and the child objects are a 3D capsule to act as the player’s body (“PlayerObj”), an empty object to track the direction the player is facing (“Orientation”), and another empty object to track the camera’s position (“CamPos”). The camera was separate from the Player to avoid bugs and was coded to follow CamPos. I made three scripts: PlayerCam (tracks mouse input to move the camera), MoveCam (locks camera to transform position), and PlayerMovement (moves player using arrow/WASD keys, limits speed, and applies drag if the player is grounded). The object rotation was difficult and is still being worked on. I followed a different video. How the code is supposed to work is that the player is supposed to hit the “E” key to pick up an object, check if the object has a certain tag, the camera would switch to a second camera, and the object would be moved to an empty object. One issue I had relating to the code was that whenever I picked up an object, the player would clip through the floor. I fixed the issue by adding the throw mechanic from the video that I originally omitted. The rotation and throw/drop still need to be worked on.

The second task I started was making a Google Doc to jot down the backstory of the characters. So far, I have started on Arden (the player character), the killer, and one victim (Heather). For coming up with the backstory of the killer, primarily coming up with a reason why he kills, I researched reasons why they kill. One reason that I found and was comfortable with was financial gain. The working idea is that the killer lists the cabin rental as a side hustle, kills people, robs their belongings, and makes it seem like the victims disappeared.