First playable

 

(Source: Myself)

For this post, I'll be talking about the progress I've made on my game. Last week, I was able to create my bicycle controller but I needed the pedals to move. Shaun suggested that I use animations for it so that's what I tried. I created an animation for the pedals but I wasn't sure exactly how to make move with the character so I tried other methods. After 6 hours of trial and error, I was really close to scraping the bicycle and trying a different vehicle but I kept on going. Eventually, I found this amazing unity tutorial that teaches about all types of rotations. I used the quaternion look at rotation code and created two spheres for each pedal to look at. This solved my problem and I could finally move onto my character.

For the character, I followed this low poly tutorial in Blender. It was good enough for my first model so I'll keep it for now but I will eventually change it. Learning how to use blender is pretty fun. I then had to rig it so I continued on with this tutorial by the same guy. It took awhile to do it and even still it didn't work that great. I don't think that type of rigging is made for Unity so I'll have to change it but for now it's ok. 

Now for the tricky, to get the character on and off the bicycle. I wasn't entirely sure how I could do this but I followed a few tutorials and that didn't work for me. I also made the character have an idle and walk state but I can't find any bicycle animations. I don't want keep spending time on this issue as I want to move on so my only option for now is to keep the character on the bicycle for now and change it when I have everything else done. 

To keep the character on the bicycle, I watched this tutorial on how this developer made his bicycle game and he said he used inverse kinematics. I then found some inverse kinematics code online and applied it to my character and bicycle and it worked! It took awhile to fully make it look good but I'm happy with the progress. I now have a working model. To be honest, I think the game would work better if the character just stays on the bicycle as that is the main focus of the game and would give me more time to focus on other things.

For next week, I need to start building the city and the woods. I think this will be challenging but I'm sure I can do this!