Project deadline passed - new deadline

OK, December is here, end of November, so game is released now?  No, release did not happen.  It's not all doom and gloom, I am close, but I'm constantly finding problems, and while they are now mostly behind me, I didn't even get to finish some mandatory features.  So I am going to extend my deadline by a week to fix up last minute bugs, and add the last few features.

This last couple of weeks has been yet another solid reminder of what difficulty AI, animation and physics is.  I noticed people saying this about sports games when I started the project, but really now understand it.  As they said back then, if I just made game X, Y or Z, there would be so much less AI, so much less crazy animation combinations, etc, etc.  Yes, I once again had a really tough time of it getting through various crazy bugs and conditions.  Since I had many repeated issues, I'll mention the high repeat ones:

• Attaching AI script files to avatars.  My AI is built script by script, so rather than a mega AI script, I have one for contesting the ball, one for getting to a contest, one for leading, etc, etc.  One of the biggest problems I keep running into is I just haven't added a script to the player avatar.  It starts off with watching the AI do something really silly, and thinking I have to fix that.  Then I try to work through the script logic, seems like it should be doing the right thing.  Perhaps the entry logic is incorrect and the logic never gets run?  No that looks OK.  Finally, when I can't give a single reason the logic isn't firing, I realise the script isn't attached, therefore not even running!  It's the easiest thing in the world to fix, yet has alluded me probably a dozen times and caused a lot of wasted dev hours.
• Floating targets.  Leaving physics to Unity does some weird things that aren't game friendly, so early on I decided to tackle it myself, but doing it yourself is a major pain too.  One of the issues I constantly stumble on is players floating away or falling through the earth.  There is nothing that takes you out of the game quicker than seeing someone runs towards a spot 2m above the ground, or sinking through the earth, or someone rotating on a 45 degree angle to the earth (eg they should fall over doing this).  I have little of this happening right now, though I've had to temporarily disable bumping, which I really want back in, so more work to happen, eg what do I do when someone is bumped mid jump, they need to still land again (currently they idle in mid air)
• Timing a target.  I knew this would be painful.  The ball is flying in using gravity etc, and we need to jump to meet it.  At first I programmed it to just mark if the radius is close and we are closest, but lately I got a real trigger working on the players hands, where they only marked it if their hand got to it first.  This works pretty well now, but was a huge effort and is still not 100% yet.  When it works, it is very impressive however.

So, with the deadline done, was I just a few bugs short?  Not really.  Every day has feel like 1 step forward 2 steps back recently, and it's worn me down too.  As an example, in October, I could mark a ball, go back to kick at goal, and go to the next play after kicking a goal, with the score ending up on the scoreboard.  It was rough and buggy, but all that worked.  In the last few weeks, I have struggled getting a mark.  I have broken and just recently fixed the ability to get back to kick a goal.  I have broken and just fixed the ability to have another play after the first.  I have broken, and is still broken, the ability to even kick a goal, though to be fair, this is a new game mechanic I've been working on.  And then there were bugs!  Finally by the deadline, I had patched most pieces together, and to be honest, most stuff is coded pretty well, so I should be in a good position to use this code as a base, not retrofit 90% of code after beta release.  I have a few fluffy things to finish off with, like celebrations, crowd, umpires, but even some of this I've been working on.

I could probably get the beta "finished" by the weekend, but I'm giving myself another half a week to add a few features I really wanted from day one.  The game itself won't have any content outside of playing, so I want the beta to feel a little more than I just got something working, I want it to feel like my game.  A couple of the features I've really looked forward to adding is AI around celebrations or crowd, where the players react more real depending on the situation.  It's annoying to play a sport game and see someone do a massive celebration 10 goals behind in the last quarter, or the commentator get excited, eg. in that exact situation commentator AI should be choosing between things like "a small ray of sunlight on an otherwise gloomy afternoon" or "that's not going to affect the result today."  But instead they say things like "he's just really firing today," completely out of context for the game.  Or even better (and with unlimited time to code a commentator AI), it would take into account things like the season.  "That won't change the result... but percentages are very important late in the season and being in the mix for finals" or "that won't change the result, but they'll want to get a bit closer to make sure this result doesn't ruin the start of their season."

My point is, I don't want to be putting out a product that just barely gets the job done, I need to build some strengths where I can, and hopefully add something positive to the playing experience.

So now that I've breached my November deadline, I'll add roughly a week on until I reach the objective of be able to play a basic game with minimal bugs, and perhaps a few nice extras in the game play that aren't yet.  I'm still going to push hard to have that done by Wednesday 7th December.

2 weeks remain - animation animation animation

With less than 2 weeks left, I should be looking at putting some polishing touches on this game, but am instead running circles around the ball, both metophorically, and in some cases, that's what the actual player is doing.

I'm making progress, and at some point, I would have had to do what I'm doing if I wanted a complete game, I guess I figured I wouldn't need to go through this hassle in the 12 week project part.  On paper, the game seems to have changed in very small ways the last 5 weeks, possibly going backwards in some ways.  But I had reached the abosolute limit of my hacky animation controller, and it was taking me hours to make a small change, because it would break something else in the process.

OK, so the things I've been up against recently:

• Animation.  At one point this was a simple little thing, that just needed slight tweaking to finalise, at least in my mind.  A better way to actually look at it, it is a monster.  Unity and Mixamo kicked my ass for a good few days.  There is generic model/animation and humanoid model/animation in Unity.  By default the Mixamo stuff comes out generic, but that doesn't work well with Unity transforms.  Google helped me realise I needed to change it to Humanoid, but that just plain didn't animate.  The answer alluded me brilliantly, you need to find the base avatar, set that Humanoid, then change every animation.  Next, the animations now work, but look rediculous, like when running, the animation itself looks great, but when rigged to a humanoid avatar, limbs just go in weird directions, making it look like they are in the process of turning, when they are going dead straight.  I have no idea how I resolved this, but I had 50 attempts before something just worked.  And apart from that, I found the more animations I got, the more complex and buggy the Animator became.  It's frustrating debugging the animator, seeing the flag to start jumping is set, and the animator is completely ignoring it, when the only thing I've set is to jump when that flag is true.  This just went through a complete overhaul.  I've now ripped the entire original controller out, and replaced the animations with sub states, where the main state is either idle, moving, jumping, bumping, spoiling, but under each of those, there are substates, so under moving there is running, walking, running backwards, etc.  This works well, and whats more, adding another animation is childs play now.  In terms of content, I've worked through a few types of marking, I've added bumping and walking.  Animation is not complete, but it's definitely in the best place it's been for a while.
• I also finally managed to get some colour on my characters.  I heard an interesting comment about game design, and saying it's easier to get excited about a project if it's looking good.  That is it's all well and good to say you should be able to make the controls and physics work while the characters are just cubes, but it's easier to get excited about it if they look like Aussie Rules players.  I had no idea how I was going to do this, but Adobe stepped in for me with a free preview tool called Fuse.  Fuse allows you to define a look for a 3D character, from skin, to hair, to body shape, to clothes.  I used this to get a sort of Aussie Rules type clothing, but there is no colour editing in that tool.  The final edit was a little hacky, each clothing is an object, but has several files to render it, some for the mesh, some for the material qualities.  I opened the diffuse map in paint.net, reworked the key areas to be like teams tops, shorts and socks, and now have proper looking players.  Not perfect, but not bad at all.

So, I'm up against it for time now.  A lot of things seem to be on the too hard list now, and just getting a non-buggy gameplay could possibly soak up most of the remaining time.  There is no point backing down though, I am going to push hard this next week and a half, and just see how much I can squeeze into it.  With a little luck, I can get a decent product up and running, and have my solid base to work from.

So things to look at this week:

• Finalise the bumping, spoiling and marking.  This will not be perfect, but I have to call it quits somewhere, and it at least has to have bumping and some level of marking/dropping a ball.  Spoiling doesn't have a good animation, but again, I don't have time to learn 3D animation creation, so I have to work with what I have.
• Finalise the decision making of the defenders
• Organise the player positions at the start of every play
• Finalise camera positions

Nice to haves if I can squeeze out a couple more hours:

• Umpires and crowd
• Noises
• Music
• Settings (eg. sound on/off, less graphics for older phones)

The list of things I'm not going to attempt by next week is too big to bother listing, but it's essentially down to getting a solid base by next week, and then I'll try to look back and re-assess everything that I've done.  I have to then look at what other projects I want to play around with next (the list is growing), and whether there is enough in this product to bother continuing with, or whether to just put this down as a learning project.

Wednesday update #7 AI Physics IOS

It's been 2 weeks since a Wednesday update, AI, AI, AI.  Well, to be fair, AI and physics.

As November fires up it's engines, the end line looks exceptionally close, which is good and bad.  On one hand, it will be good to see an end to this project, on the other there is nowhere near enough time left!

Here is how the last two weeks went:

• AI.  Getting the first two players to try to mark properly has been kind of tough, and I'm not even sure I'm going to fully get it by release either.  I've spent about 2 weeks working through some physics/AI/animation issues here, and it's a slow process.  When there are problems that don't make sense, you goto to debug the problem.  Here, I've had a big problem, as the debugging often freezes up after a little while, restarting Unity and VS are sometimes needed.  I'd say in every dev session, this has happened at least 5 times, and it's realistically 10 minutes gone once you finally give up on it, restart everything, get the code back to the same break point.  It's also just generally slow to get your head around these issues.  You can have a few triggers that might end up affecting a case, and if a certain code doesn't get hit, it could be because of something wrong in 3 different files, so knowing which part is not correct can cause problems.  A few big AI issues around contests have been looked at.  Right now, the player can decide if they have time to go for a big mark, or just run to a place where the ball will be lower to the ground.  If they get there in time they can pause and wait, if they don't get there in time they don't try to jump.  It looks pretty good so far, but there are a few really obvious missing entries.
• Animation.  I've been meaning to have a little crack at animation editing, and yesterday did some.  I had a good AFL like marking animation, but it was too slow, so the player goes from running full speed, to stop, to slowly build up to the jump.  To fix this, I duplicated the mark animation, and set the starting point of the animation to be as he's about to lead into the jump.  Now he runs toward the contest, and just launches into the jump, it looks and works well.  The animation controller allows him to go from idle or running to jumping, and has kicking etc too.  So far so good for animation, there is a tonne more to do.
• Physics.  I say AI a lot, but really a lot of it is physics.  Most bugs are physics bugs not AI bugs right now, like right now when the player completes a mark, they make a crazy looking semi-arc back to where they launched for the mark.  This will be easy enough to fix, but there are random crazy looking things everywhere.  A big thing I've looked at is timing the player to meet the ball.  This is definitely a science, and the problem is a ball approaching really quickly, and a player jumping at the same time, the timing is not quite there for me to perfect this unfortunately, but I have it pretty close now.  I've managed to find the players hand object, so part of a mark is getting that hand close enough to the ball object, and claiming it, which I do by making the hands it's parent object.  I got the code to a really good place yesterday.
• IOS.  I got a mac, and ordered a dev license, so have nothing but a little pain in front of me before I can develop on ipad.
• Other.  I did get a couple of other things in.  Grass.  This has been a pain, and at this point, I think I've ditched it, and gone with my weird looking terrain.  One of the big problems is getting the grass short enough.  Unitys built in grass looked fine at 1m high (in my game), but when 10cm high got an extremely blotchy field.  I found a couple of good examples of better things to try, a tree stripped down to look like grass and then use the tree option on terrain.  This worked fine, but again was near impossible to get looking right for low grass.  I had a rest on this, and a breakthrough the next day to use an image with just a small height grass, ie lots of space above it.  This worked for both methods, but... using the grass terrain, it looked fine from below but just looked awful from above, and chewed through my frame rate once you tried to display the whole field.  The tree method wasn't much better.  In the meantime I'd been learning a bit about shading the grass to look more realistic tone, and essentially just kept the same field I had, but toned it better, as well as toning some other elements better.  This gave me a decent result, and I can still get my high frame rate, so this is pretty much me for now.  If the project goes well enough, I may need to invest in a grass asset from the asset store.  Other things were minor.  Got some advertising boards done, needs to be finished off though.

Overall, the leading for the ball, running, jumping, marking all looks good in a very simple example.  Of course AFL is not simple, and thus the big problem I'll have going forward.  I was watching an 80's game on TV, and just noticed some things that you really can't get an AI to do, as an example, the ball was kicked to a contest, and two guys wrestled near the target point, as my game will hopefully do.  Another couple waited patiently in case it wasn't marked.  Then a player from the other direction ran back with the flight and took an amazing mark over the two guys wrestling.  This is where AI gets really interesting.  Now lets say I see that, and say, yes I guess that is a possible move someone could make.  It can't happen every time a player is there, it would spoil the game.  Yet it was mark of the day, and what fans really love watching about the sport, the one off big moves.  I need to think about this somewhat.  Perhaps I could chamber 5 or 6 "exciting" moves, and when a chance to use them comes up, I randomly pick it like 1 of 5 times the situation is possible the player goes for it, and maybe 2 in 3 they stuff it up anyway.  Food for thought.

But way back here in current reality, I have a release to work towards, and a lot of much bigger problems.  This week I'll be aiming to:

• Add non-jumping marks, eg player just puts there hands up and marks without jumping
• Add spoils.  The worse off player should try to spoil the marking player
• Add more physics logic to a mark.  Right now it's just proximaty to right hand, but it should be the spot in between both hands, and given I don't have crazy good animations, probably need to accept marks if it's slightly under the hands, but exclude marks if they are too high or low
• Bug fixes in those general areas
• If I get sick of AI/physics, probably time to start working on the player uniforms too, finish off the advertising banners, finish off the stands properly.  

Weeks to go!

Wednesday update #6 late - Hump Week

It's been a tough week, hard to get into it this week for various reasons.  I finally got the momentum going again last night, but technically that was Thursday, so really a very poor return this week:

• Got a training area.  I plan to make the AI work itself out here.  So rather than mess with the main scene I created a trainign scene, and plan to build a whole lot of scenarios into this scene.  It will be sort of like an AI unit test, although I'll have to visualise the results, but it's just too difficult to do other ways.  The plan is to make changes to AI, then run this in as many scenarios as I can, and watch the AI do it's thing.
• Cleaned up some code.  Creating a new scene showed me there too many weird dependencies in my classes.  I couldn't add AI to a player, without having to add this to the scene, with then needed the manager, etc, etc.  I have cleaned it up a little, though for the most part I just added the components, I need to move on.  Also, as I work more in the AI classes, I plan to clean up the code somewhat.  The structure isn't too bad yet, but evertime I come to an AI class I haven't seen for 10+ days, it takes me 10 minutes to work through the decisions.  I think In future projects, I may end up adding a tonne more AI classes, specific to different ideas, with descriptive class names.

But to be honest, I didn't get any real traction on any real work.  I'm hitting a bit of a wall when it comes to drive on this project.  I guess I came in thinking, that if someone who likes Aussie Rules games hears about this, I will get a lot of support, that might grow and grow by launch.  But there are many factors playing against me.  Firstly, I have never actually written a game.  Love sports games and complain about them as I do, this doesn't make me any more of an expert then 50m other sports gamers.  This really reduces peoples care factor about what I'm doing, because they (maybe rightfully) don't think I can do anything good at this stage.  I think another factor is the limited scope I'm aiming at.  It's a catch 22, because I don't think I could have finished a project if I was aiming at a fully blown console version.  But then nobody really wants a cut down version.  Then I guess it's just a bit disallusioning looking more into the future of what is indie dev for me.  If I can't even gather any interest in a specific sport with a huge lack of games in that area, then what chance do I have competing in bigger markets as a sole developer?

Well, last night I got some decent stuff going, so I'm back on focus again now.  I figure I'll do this until end of November, try to deploy as a beta to android, perhaps even IOS, and re-assess.  But there is no point putting in a half assed final 6 weeks, and looking back and saying I couldn't get any support.  At this stage my final hope for getting some support is to really work hard at making a decent fun game, and hope those that do step up to have a go like it and spread the word.  So this week I should be:

• Working on unit testing.  That is boring code talk, but it essentially means my AI will have a set of conditions it needs to pass.  I did half of this Thursday, when I set out the conditions for when and how a player should get to a contest, but technically that's next week.
• Work on getting to a contest AI.  There is a lot of AI to think about still, my first target is to get players to intuitively get to a contest, thinking about other players, the ball etc.
• If I still have time, it's then collisions.  The biggest difficulty is going to be making a non-repetetive way for players to collide, be it the bump before the contest, a player flying in from the side, 3-4 players all going for the jump at once.  I have some ideas, though the code for this one will be interesting to say the least.  My ideal is that my unit test scenarios will produce not only somewhat realistic contests, but also not the exact same contest each time.  Like occasionally one of the 4 players should jump too early, because they are nervous about the upcoming contact from up to 3 players.  Yet other times they should nail the jump, and perhaps even take the mark.  But it is important to keep it simple first, so something there will likely give.

Wednesday update - half way point and screenshots

I have achieved what I set out to this week in terms of rounding off some of the gameplay options:

• Scoreboard - this is now showing the score as well as menu options.  I also added a similar styled scoreboard in the game itself while playing.  I would have just gone a TV styled score tracker, but again through the grass roots idea would benefit from an old fashioned look to the in game score, I think it looks good.
• Timer - again my default thought was a timer shown in a computer font, but again the old grass roots timer came to mind.  It's something any WAFL/VFL fan would instantly recognise, so it is now a must for my game.  Getting the hand to cooperate took more time than I'd hoped, and in fact the main one is still not working 100%, but it's mainly useful for in play, so you can now get a feel for roughly how many shots you might have left.  This will not only leave a little nice feeling see that style of clock, but also hopefully give a feeling of nerves.  Those clocks don't tell you exactly how long the game has left, so it's a bit of guesswork needed, good for nerves if it's a close game.
• Gameplay options - I was a little worried about this, but it came together nicely.  I didn't want to complicate things too much, so kept to some pretty simple rules.  Firstly, the clock ticks a minute (of actual play time) and randomises whether opponent or you can get a play in.  For opponent right now, you pretty much just see the result (may choose to allow a defense against CPU later), for out turn, we get to play.  When we play, you'll notice in the top, the clock has moved on, and the score may or may not be different if opponent has scored.  The only smarts I'm building into the strategy, is if you get 2 goals in a row, the other team drops a player in defense.  This makes it a little easier to get it into your forward line, but the extra defender makes it harder to actually score.  Apart from tweaking the randomness a little, this is now pretty much complete.
• Graphics - had a little less energy last night, so I just played around with a few graphics things.  I added a hot dog stand, and right where it used to be at Lathlain Park.  I added the 2nd stand.  I found a park bench that I will use a lot of, but putting it in the stand (as it is in real) doesn't look right yet.  Plus it adds 100+ detailed 3D objects to the scene, so not sure this will stay.  I might create my own very low poly bench for stands, and just never do real close ups.

As for general thoughts, it's been a yo-yo week.  A little on a high thinking that I'm half way done now, and I have a decent amount of game already behind me.  But I have a nagging problem I can't shake off.  If I release it as planned, it may well be fun to play, but for the random player, just playing any sports game without a league or something for it to mean something, will leave it too light.  If I saw such a game without knowing any background, even if I loved the gameplay, couldn't leave it a 5 star review, as it would feel incomplete to me.  Then if anybody doesn't like the gameplay, or finds a few bugs, might reduce it more, maybe even 1 stars.  If you don't get any 5 stars, but you do get some 1 stars...  it won't end up a good rating.  It doesn't mean that much in reality, as I know why it's not great rating, but it's still a public showing of my skills, and 2.4/5 isn't something to brag about.  Essentially, while the 12 week project is a great idea to get something up and running, and get something done, it's a little weak when it comes to app store releases, especially something like this, where not having a league option is an obvious hole.  I now figure I might get away with a public beta.  In this way, I can still release it in 12 weeks, but nobody will assume it's a fully finished product, and will hopefully mark accordingly.  I will still aim to do this on android (have checked google play, it's possible), and hope to be getting a Mac very soon, so then will start looking how to do this on ios too.

Next week it's back to player AI again.  I'm going to start with 1 on 1, but with the idea that it could be 2 on 2, 3 on 3, and any of those plus a floating defender.  But I imagine I'll be working on the 1 on 1's for some time still, as it's easier to identify and fix bugs.  If I get a bit of lighter time, I still have a lot of the ground features that need to be finished.

Screenshots:

Main menu.  Was a 2nd option, but it's not planned now, so just removed it.  Side white bar is an ad bar:

Start of game.  Our guy has the ball up the ground, you drag the full forward to give him a path

After taking the mark, camera drops back behind player to take a shot:

 1/4 time, and we go back to the scoreboard:

Wednesday Update #4

Very little real time since the last late update, but some progress has been made still.  To be honest, I've been fluffing around the big issues of AI and collision, but I feel on any day I can be in a position where I want to demo my game on my phone (happened quite a lot on holidays), and while I was proud with what I had to show, a few days work to fluff up the graphical side of things would have made it far more impressive.

Work done in the last couple of days:

• I have a logo.  I created a facebook page now, and it asked for a logo, so I created one.  It's not too bad, and I've already put it on top of my scoreboard, which I think looks nice
• I had a side thought about how to manage instructions in this game, and came up with a coaches whiteboard, so whipped one up.  I found a handwriting font, so it looks a little more like the coach is writing on a whiteboard.  It doesn't look spectacular, but is nice, and lerps in and out from the side.  I aim to use this for "commentary", which will effectively be coaches tips at 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 time... assuming I have time to do this.  At very least I may have an array of encouraging comments for these breaks.  There is then a "got it" magnetic sticker that the user can press so they don't need that instruction any more.  The whole thing works quite well I thought.
• I had various thoughts about this game being too easy, which essentially it would be in real life with just a 1v1.  The forward can lead anywhere they like, and without AI cheating, it would be very difficult to stop them getting a mark.  But if I allow more than one player to control my discs, which I didn't love anyway, won't work.  I also had a very simple approach to a moving version of this game, for mobile.  Drag a player to move them, tap to pass.  This works actually somewhat better than console sometimes, because I can instruct 3 players to move in directions, then tap to pass it to the one that works best, this would be difficult to master with xbox.  Well, I got it working.  Now, when you drag your finger from a player, it plots out points every 4m or so (felt about right) and shows it while you are still planning.  Then you press play, the path disappears, but is remembered by the player and they execute.  Once they get to the last point, the AI kicks in again, and if you don't want that you should be able to drag them again, though it doesn't currently allow this, and I may leave it out of V1 for simplicity reasons.  The way it works is it starts a tracking if MouseDown (also finger down) hits a player or their disc, and then tracks until mouse up.  It only stores points if they are 4m away from the last point, which works well, even if they completely change direction.  It stores those in a List of points for the player, then the various AI elements check to see whether that List is empty.  If it's not, the AI follows point to point, deleting points when they get close enough.  When all points are gone, other AI elements will again wake up and decide where to run to next if needed.  If the ball is kicked, the path is also destroyed, and they will either go for the contest, or not depending on where they are, who they are.  This works really well so far, and the player changes direction in quite a realistic way when following crazy paths, as I made them slow down more the larger the change of direction is.

That is all so far, and the list of changes needed don't seem to get any smaller.  Here is a somewhat brief overview:

• Game management.  Have a main menu, can reset play, it tracks scoring.  But, it doesn't show the score.  I have a scoreboard, but am not thrilled about panning in and out all the time to show this, so would like an on screen score.  This could get tricky, as I've noticed I can't assign free text to the instructions board, and completely different free text to another element.  I'm cheating around this by making images of common wordings (like "got it", "Play", "Start new game"), which I may just continue to do, or find a better way to do text.  Other management issues not yet tackled include 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 time breaks, AI for opposition scoring, storing any setting change, previous scores.  There are stacks of bigger things, but that will be V2 if ever.
• AI.  It's off to a nice start, there are plenty of minor bugs still.  I need to also think about when not to run full speed to places, such as getting to a contest still jogging, not sprinting to a stop and then jumping at contest.  When to run backwards, when to brace for a collision, when to lead or hang back.
• Contest.  Similar to above, but worthy of it's own section, this is nearly non-existant so far.  So I need to build good physics around bumping into players, wrestling, diving for a ball, change of direction.  Not really AI, but more physics around how things will work.  This is vital, if I get this right, the game will feel right, and if feels right, it will be a good game, pretty much that simple
• Graphics.  This area improved a lot, and I need to focus just on what I can easily achieve I think.  I need to paint the bipeds with football clothes, which I started and wasn't all that problematic.  I need to check through the animations and get those looking OK, especially around contests, though animations are going to be a weakpoints, and there is no easy answer there.  I need to work more on the home ground, though it looks OK for now, so this might be a lower priority.  Scoreboard still needs completing for when showing scores, not the menu.  Grass textures, ads on signs/field, crowd, umpires, animations for celebrations, coaches, kick to kick, these are all on the way too low priority right now, AI/Contest are far more important.
• Sound.  There is none right now, and perhaps by V1 release too, again due to not being as urgent.  What I do have planned is crowd noise, football impact, collision noise, players calling.  I'd like noises for pressing options, music in the background.  Options to turn sounds off too.
• Sound.  There is none.  However unfortunate, it may stay that way too

Looking at that list, I could spend a bit more time getting the ability to play a game with scoreboard going, which I'm only a few steps away from, so perhaps that is my main focus by next week, and then AI/contest has to become most of the focus:

• Fix any bugs around end of play, should be able to also go to next contest without fuss
• Show scores after each play, and the score during play.  I'm thinking of using a scoreboard like material and images to place on top rather than free text, somewhere central and big for current goal/behind/miss, and in the top right corner for current score, to give it a more authentic feel, will see how that looks
• Have a 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 times and game finished.  Show the full scoreboard with proper scoreboard look at these breaks too.

Wednesday Update #3 (Sundayish)

This will still be basically Wednesday, as I flew to Melbourne Thursday morning for a few nights away, and have done nothing since.  In fact, I was away from Friday before that with family and did nothing then either, so very little has happened.

I did get a few little pieces in:

• Discs under players.  I will get some player looks done sometime soon, however I still don't know that will quite be enough.  I also like the discs under players in AFL TV shows, and realise it's pretty easy, so did that.  I put a 2 colour material on it, so we now havve noticable teams, blue and yellow, and red and black.  If the player has the ball, the disc spins too, so it's obvious when someone has the ball.
• I also added a trail to the ball, to make it more noticable where the ball is and the angle it's going.  It's as simple as a Trail Renderer in Unity, and took only a few minutes to tweak into something quite impressive.  I might have to stop it when a player does grab the ball however, as it's more for when it's being passed.
• I also took a couple of looks at the AI, mainly stopping the crazy running in circles, as it's driving me mad.  I tried to slow down when trying to turn more than a few degrees, and also to be more liberal in knowing when they are almost at a target.  Still not there, needs more time.

Most of all, I've changed the scope down to a total of 12 weeks work, from when it started.  It comes back to an idea from the Unity forums, which is to get something released.  The theory is if you set your ideas too big, the end line can shift, things can get a bit too hard, other projects come up, etc, etc.  It's essentially easy to not finish something, and always have that idea that never really led anywhere.  So the 12 week idea is to get something released in 12 weeks, just get something done.  Beyond that, is yet to be seen, there are so many variables.  In my honest opinion, it may need some support to go too much further.  I'm not necessarily talking financial, more just community support, which I'm hoping to get from a football forum, and perhaps even just from downloads/ratings on the app stores once live.

The 12 weeks will be essentially end of November, and I've really warmed to this idea, as it gives me a harder deadline, but that allows the scope to stay small, and perhaps just to grow as needed from there.  Also, in reality December is a difficult month, so having something out there is probably better than to be expecting to work on it hard.  Perhaps it's a good time to work on some post release work that is needed, if nothing else clean up some release bugs that come up.

So not much to report, but hopefully it's back on track this week.