This week I looked quite a bit into how Arduino works, as this will end up being an important part of the final project. I actually got a chance to use an Arduino during my Digital Fabrication class, and so I got the chance to learn some of the absolute basics. As a follow-up to this, I decided to look more into how it can connect with Unity, since all I had previously found was that it was possible. It seems that the most straightforward way would be to use something called Uduino, which is an Asset Store package that adds Arduino capability to Unity. While I would prefer to do as much of this project as possible from scratch, this is something that seems to always work, as opposed to super complex code that might not actually work 100% of the time, as it wasn’t made specifically for Unity to connect to an Arduino. This seems like it might end up being a necessary evil, because making something similar is even more out of my comfort zone than the rest of this project is. 

I also looked at the Banner Saga games this week. These games are hand-drawn tactical RPGs. The games are visually impressive, but I’m not a fan of some of the gameplay mechanics. It’s a pretty standard tactical RPG- it has turn-based, grid-based combat mechanics. My main issue with these games is that turns consist of a single character moving, taking an action, and then ending their turn. The enemy then gets a chance to have a character move and take an action. The way this works means that a single enemy can get several turns in what would normally be a single rotation for other games. This makes it considerably harder to deal with this one enemy than in most games, which really doesn’t make sense to me. 

The last thing I looked at this week was the design of chess pieces. I actually have a book of example chess pieces made in different styles, which really helped me to cement my unit and piece designs. I want my pieces to be easily recognizable and distinct, so there is less of a chance for confusion during gameplay. I think an easy way to do this is to color-code the pieces. For example, I might want my player knights to be made out of a specific kind of wood, like Padauk. This would create an issue if I wanted to have my enemy units colored red or orange. My plan for this is to make the player units out of wood, with each class being color-coded. The enemy units will be made out of acrylic, and i will hopefully make each of the classes out of different multi-colored acrylic. This should also make it easy to see the difference in the digital portion of the game. By having the player units be one solid color with a distinct texture, they will stand out from the enemy units and they’re multi-colored design and different texture.