This week I created animations for the main character for running and jumping. I used Unity’s State Machine to trigger jumping motion from the default state, which is the running state. The Unity Asset for characters do not come with animations, but they do come with customizable joints angles that I can manually create animations. So I made a running motion and looped the animation to make the character running. 

Another major achievement this week is that I was able to make the character run when it is on buildings. I did some studying of Unity engine to learn the difference between an object collider and rigid body, because a combination of the two was needed to implement physics in the game. The problem I was facing this week was that I could go on top of objects, or collide with objects, which would make me stop, but there was no way in the game to indicate that I am actually “on top” of objects. This is important because if I am on top of an object I should be triggering the running animation again. So I solved this by creating another collider that only checks for being on top. I also decided to use the gift boxes as a coin in the game, so Santa would be collecting gift boxes. I added more obstacle sets this week, so now we have a pretty good / random looking and playable game with gift boxes to collect.

I also got to solve one of the major bugs in the game, which was occasionally the character infinitely shoots upward. It was due to having 2 different object colliders at the exact same spot, and the game randomly choose one to get triggered from. I decided to make one of them smaller than the other to avoid this problem. 

Overall I got to get right back on track. At this point I just need to make a UI for displaying the number of collected gift boxes, maybe some sound as well, and then work on fixing bugs in the game. If I have time I can always make more obstacles to play with, which adds to diversity and fun. The next major thing I will need to do is to measure the game delay, because now that I have substantially more features in the game, I need to go back to the initial goal to make the system playable within 250ms.