This week we took the completed game and started to look to making it more fun to play and to iron out some of the things that don’t work well at present.

Distance Measured to Buried Gem

The original gem sensor measured the distance between itself and the nearest gem and used this for signal strength. This didn’t always work well, especially on down slopes. This diagram shows why:

The straight-line distance to the gem (blue lines) on a downslope is far greater that it would be on the flat.

The solution to this was to compare just the horizontal distance between sensor and the gem, removing any height differences.

We had to make this change in both ProximitySensor.cs and PlayerDig.cs.

Sensor Signal Strength

The signal strength was calculated as follows:

Signal Strength = Distance related factor * Direction related factor

The first attempt we made at signal strength was purely based on distance, in practice this proved to be super hard to use. Including direction made it a lot easier to find the gems, but the fact that the distance related factor dropped to zero, hence making the signal strength zero, the instance our gem was behind us, even the tiniest amount, didn’t feel correct.

Our adaption was to make it so that the Signal Strength has a strong component that ‘s directional, but a small independent component that’s distance based. Here’s what that looks like:

Signal Strength = Distance related factor (0.2f + (0.8f * Direction related factor)

If we look at this equation, even when the direction related factor is zero, the signal strength doesn’t drop completely to zero, although it does get a lot lower. This feels a lot better.

Tweaking and Polishing

Our final few weeks will consist of tweaking and polishing the game. We have a document here:

Gem Search – Fixes and Improvements

to track our ideas. We probably won’t get to do them all.

Code Download

The code for this week’s project is on our GitHub, as always.