There was an issue with the movement of the player ring. The physics were previously dependent on the frame rate of the device that the game was played on, but I have fixed this by placing all physics scripting in the FixedUpdate function. I am temporarily content with the movement of the player ring. Playtesters have said that it’s intuitive and fun, but I would still like to tweak it further in the future.

I have changed the UI font and moved some text boxes around. I am not satisfied with these changes, though. I will need to do a lot more work on the UI, especially if I want to add dialogue from the best friends. The overall goal is for it to invoke the UI of a social networking app.

I have made the camera dynamic instead of static. This helps immensely with the game feel, and I am very proud of how it turned out. I might try to implement Cinemachine at a later date, but for the time being I created the camera script from scratch. It changes location and depth based on the position and size of the player.

Best friend pegs now contribute to the overall friend count. In the future, I may want to implement a mechanic where best friends can resent the player just like little friends, but that is not a priority.

Previously, the best friend pegs had been represented by simple black circles. This week, I swapped them out for actual sprites of each best friend’s face. Perhaps I should have waited until later in development to make this change as it’s nonessential, but I think the game looks a lot more interesting now. Playtesters responded positively to them as well.

One issue that arose from this change is that, when the camera zooms out, the sprites became very small. In order to fix this, the best friend pegs now grow in size along with the player (although at half the rate). This does make the game more difficult, however, because the larger pegs give the player hoop less room to build up momentum.

I fixed an issue where little friends could be inside the hoop and still turn red. The problem was that the friends were tracking collision with the hoop outline itself, not the inside of the hoop.

Playtesting helped me get a sense of how much time should pass before the little friends cut ties with the player.

I figured out how Sorting Layers work and adjusted my project accordingly. The best friends are in front of the player which is in front of the little friends. The one issue that has arose from this is that the player looks strange while surrounding a best friend with long hair. I will look into ways to fix this problem over the upcoming week.