Project Atius Update #8 Interview with Aaron Dintino

Welcome back to Project Atius, today we are going to be talking with one of our programmers on the project Aaron Dintino. Aaron is programming the lion’s share of the mechanics in the game, so I’m sure he’ll have a lot to say.

Just to start off, how long have you been working in unity?

I’ve been working in Unity for about two and a half months at this point.

Right so let’s get some basics down. What are a few of the mechanics you’ve implemented in the game, and how do they affect the player’s experience?

The dodge roll mechanic was one of the first mechanics implemented into the game. It gives the player more mobility which is useful against many of the boss’ quick attacks. Another main mechanic is the player’s fireball attack which allows the player to attack from afar while moving to avoid enemy attacks. The purpose of the player mechanics are to allow the player to deal out damage to the boss while avoiding taking damage.

Let’s talk some more about the player character, where there any specific problems you ran into while trying to get it to function?

Being fairly new to programming, there were times when I had to implement something and I had no idea how to script it. For example, getting the player camera to function properly proved challenging since we needed a camera that the player could zoom in and out, and also avoid going through walls. I had to learn programming concepts that were new to me like raycasting and vector math.

If I remember properly you were having some trouble with the dodge roll. How’d you get around that snag?

Thankfully Unity’s online community has been really helpful and there is usually a solution or explanation for any issues I’ve run into. Looking at online tutorials and watching how other programmers implement certain mechanics has taught me a lot about how the scripting language works. For the dodge roll specifically, I first asked myself what did I wanted that player character to do exactly and what did I need to learn in order to be able to create that effect. I knew that for the dodge roll, the player would need to move from point A to point B over a certain amount of time at a certain speed. My main issue I kept running into was that the player would move to point B, but it wouldn’t be over time, instead it happened instantaneously. So what happened was that when the player dodge rolled, they would appear in the new location immediately. After some researching online, I was able to find what the issue was and fix it.

Lastly I’ll just give the floor over to you. Got anything to say about your work or how it is to work on Project Atius?

Atius has been a great experience for me in many ways. Because of the amount of time I’ve spent working on the game these past five weeks, I’ve learned a lot about programming in such a short amount of time. And being primarily a level designer, I know that these new skills will allow me to be more flexible in what I can do when working on projects in the future. It’s also been a blast working with a group of talented people and seeing it all come together is a very rewarding experience.

Well thanks for your time Aaron, I really appreciate it. Stay tuned folks, Next I’m going to try to talk to one of our concept artists to get a good look at the formative stages of the project.

Cheers,

Robert