Group dev log

At the beginning of the project, we decided to clone two of the main mechanics in the Stardew Valley- Fishing, Farming. We divided the works between the three of us and then began creating the sketch version of the clone. It wasn't easy, especially regarding the part where we commit and merge our progress to the main. We often messed up the right procedure, which gave us a hard time to place it back on track. Fortunately, we slowly get used to the process and work faster coming to the end of the project. Despite that we face many challenges (scripting, unity functions) during the making, we get the opportunity to share the obstacles with our teammates and brainstorm together a valid solution. Such a moment in the project allowed us to experience what it's like to be working in a team. Moreover, we learned more about Unity. 

Our first playtest prototype didn't have a lot to show yet we gained some useful feedback from it. We showed a prototype that displayed the movement and animation of the player character with key inputs. It was a complicated process to achieve the all-direction movement animation with the fishing animation since there are a lot of branches that link with each other, yet we managed to get it done before our first playtest. Expectedly, we got some feedback that indicated some problems regarding the transition of the animation. For instance, when a player should be casting the fishing rod, it stops at its default state. Turns out we just need several more links to connect the animation. For the second playtest, we offered another display of character control but this time players can switch around two tools in the hot bar. Players can choose to use the hoe tool to plow or the fishing rod to fish. However, since the plowing animation was added to the long list of animations, things became a lot more complicated. There are playtest comments regarding that there was a difficulty in switching the tools. For instance, when the player is switching from the fishing rod to the hoe tool, the animation stops at the casting animation. We later discovered that it was an issue regarding the overlapping colliders that messed up the UI button keypress. As we were unable to find a more efficient way to tackle the problem, we decided to create a clickable area that differentiates the clicks between doing the action and switching tools. We offered more content in our last playtest where we combined the finished mechanics and the tile map with decorations of some houses and trees. More content allowed us to gain more feedback. For instance, we got feedback about having too many walkable spaces in the scene which we have to fill in more decorations to create a richer scene. At some point, when the player was fishing at the bottom of the screen the pop-up minigame somehow got blocked by the Hotbar. Also, we were told that we can apply visuals to indicate that players have captured something after fishing. To tackle these problems, we reconstructed the scene with a lot more decorations and created an inventory where players can check what they have captured.

Overall, making Stardew Valley was a fruitful experience as we plan out step by step the process of recreating it and finding solutions to new problems.