Multiplayer Tests with Beat Generation & Score System (Studio 2 - Weeks 8-9)

A video documentation of all the various tests I did to integrate multiplayer with the beat generation and score systems in Unity.

With no prior experience with Unity and no solid background in programming, my initial code had issues if two or more players simultaneously jumped in the same frame (unlikely to happen in real life, but possible). 

After meeting with Jadd, he helped me with a new character script that could be applied to multiple characters and link different instances of the Kinect gesture listener to each character. This consultation session with Jadd proved to be extremely useful, as I feel like I'm finally getting a good grasp of how Unity works and the logic/structure behind components and how they talk to one another. I feel like this underlying logic and lesson learnt will form a good basis for me moving forward with Unity.

Further testing revealed issues/bugs including: the score not registering for the first beat; the score being added even when there were no beats; score exponentially increasing over multiple beats; how confusing it can be with four players showing the silhouettes and custom designed characters; and a jump being detected when arms are raised (rather than physically jumping).

I feel like my code is a mess, and needed to be cleaned up in order to resolve some of these issues. A quick fix included reducing the jump detection completion time by tweaking the Kinect gestures code, so that it switches to complete quicker after each jump.

Also had a quick impromptu meeting with Chris, who suggested manually extrapolating the Kinect data, i.e. the joint position of the spine base, to drive effects and animation. This will provide a non-binary option (rather than just true and false) to give more variation to the game. Definitely something I can look into further perhaps as a future iteration and if I had more time.