After my previous devlog, I started working on new features for the games and fixed a couple of bugs that were found during playtesting. 

Mana UI Update

During the last playtest, we discovered that players didn't notice that they had mana and when asked, they didn't understand what the blue mana bars were. Mana was only used when a sprout was successfully grown, so the bars being used can seem to be inconsistent. There is also nothing that makes the players look at the top left of the screen.

Our professor suggested that the mana bar UI should move towards the sprout being grown. We liked this idea and chose to implement his suggestion because it creates association between the mana bar and the player's growth ability.

The animation is done in world space, not in the UI because I think it would be easier. The location of an UI element can in the world be obtained like this:

When the player successfully grows a sprout, a sprite prefab is created and it moves from the used mana bar location to the grown sprout location. This is done by interpolating from the start location to the end location. To add a little bit of a flare, I made it so that the UI sprite goes in a curve instead of a straight line. I did this by cubing the interpolation progress for the x axis and rooting the interpolation progress for the z axis. 

Interpolation has a 0 to 1 value that represents start to end. Powering and rooting 0 and 1 by any number will always result in 0 and 1. Therefore the start and end value stays 0 and 1. However, what happens in the middle is different, creating a curved climb. It's not much, but it makes the animation a bit more natural compared to going at a linear speed and direction. 

Starts slow, fast towards the end                               Starts fast, slow towards the end

Bouncy Pad Physics Problem

This is the current version of the bouncy pad plant, automatically launching the player and items by a far distance. This allows players and items to cross gaps and transport items quickly by chaining the bouncy pads. 

When making this, there was a bug where the distance of the launch was sometimes half of the intended value. For example, it should have been 4 meters in the +x direction, but the object only went up to 2 meters in the +x direction. 

After looking into it further, I discovered that when the object is being launched by the bouncy pad, the object considers itself as touching the floor when the physics update, which halves the velocity. During that, the bouncy pad instantly launches the object when triggered. After tinkering around for quite a while, I decided to hold the object in the air for 0.1 seconds before being launched. This ensures that the physics updates and the object is not touching anything. I don't know why I didn't try this first, so yeah. Don't be like me.