Journal Entry #2 + #3

This project was silent for a pretty long time, but now I'm back. And to compensate for this long break I have for you today two journal entries in one and the final build of this project. Quite nice deal don't you think? Let's get into it!

07.05.2021 - (Re)Start of the implementaton - 6 hours

I finally found some time to start working on this project. First I set up casual enemies. Right amount of health, no collision damage (since the design doesn't mention it) and FOV. I set the FOV in a way that each enemy is looking just ahead of itself as you would guessed. Next I tweaked the pressure pads so their functionality is according to the design. One of them is still pressed by the players character others require a box (or dead body) in order to work. For the two pads that needs to be pressed simultaneously I wrote a simple script. For the pad that can be also pressed by the archers dead body I used a little trick. When you kill the archer a box with an upside down archer texture will appear. This simulates the dead body and you can press the pad with it. Since these "corpses" would be pretty annoying in the rest of the level (at least I assume that) I implemented it just here. Next I created the destructible rocks that will spawn the boxes. I was scared about this at first but I just simply set the box as active when the rock is destoyed. It's easy but effective solution. One problem is that after you destoy the rock there is some junk left. Since these leftovers of the rock were pretty disrupting I decided to remove them completely. The efect of destroying the rock is now a little bit lackluster but on the other hand the gameplay is more smooth. I also set correct healthpoints to the bosses. So far it was great. Then I wanted to set up weapon pickups. Since I knew these are in the kits premade levels I just load the right scene and copied the object. But when I returned back to the original scene Unity reported some bug. Huh!? That was strange. I started the game in order to test it and suddenly all characters were falling through the ground and the error message disappeared. Unfortunately I wasn't able to recover from this bug. But fortunately I had the previous version of the project (the one after first implementation) so I rollbacked to it and quickly implemented what I have done so far (Note: The time I spent doing this is not part of the 6 hours. It took me like an hour and I think that I shouldn't count it.) After this little accident I headed back to weapon pickup implementation. No problem here. Two spots where you get access to your weapons and I also set up checkpoints here. Next I implemented keys. That was pretty easy. Then I implemented the jump height. Since there is nothing like jump height on the character (or at least I didn't find it) I have to alter the gravity which affects the character. I tested which values match the required height and set them up. Since you can't really equip the melee weapon your jump is increased permanently when you pick it up. Now was time to implement health system. I just simply added a lives variable to the character and set its decrement (or increment) accordingly. But now there was a problem. What to do when player looses all his lives. Just restart the level, return to the main menu or quit the game. I tried implementing all the variants but I was successsful only with the last one. When I tried to implent the other two I either got stuck on loading screen or the game over screen didn't show up. I think that I wasn't able to resolve this since I don't really understand how the StartCoroutine() function works. But as it is now the game will simply quit when you reach zero lives. Then I added some text that displays the current amount of lives you have plus some win message, when you reach the end of the level. This was pretty easy since the text setup was explained in one of the tutorials I have done previously. Next I implemented the life crystals near the spikes. Nothing hard but the kit doesn't have the texture of the floating crystal so instead I used some "magical" plant that grows from the ceiling. Lastly I tweaked the damage values of the players weapons and set acid to instakill. If I remember correctly that was all for this day. 

08.05.2021 - Improve the level - 2:20 hours

There was still a lot of work left but the time was also ticking. First I wanted to let the camera focus on the doors when they are opening. I know there is something like LookAt() method which should help with it. Unfortunately even if I done it exactly the same way as on the tutorial video it didn't work. I suspect that it's because camera in this game is set up a little bit differently. Since I wasn't successfull with that I revisited the quit on death and tried to implement it differently. This part is bugging me even now. I feel that the force quit on death is bad. But in the other cases the game over screen is not shown and I think that that is also bad. Since the clocks were running all this time I had to reconsider what to do now. Either I could try to implent the AI for bosses (which I assume would take a big chunk of time) or I could try to polish the level and gave it a more "tomb" feel (I think it's more like a cave in my case). So I set appropriate textures to the platforms since they have grass texture by default. I also made a pretty nice background (at least in my opinion) that really delivers the feeling of being inside some cave. I used a tile textures for it. I just scale them to be bigger and set a different material for them. Overall I was pretty happy with the direction the level was taking. I just needed some decorations to make it more lively.

10.05.2021 - Decorating + Playtesting - 1:30 hour

Nothing special here. I was just scattering some decorations around the level. Some plants here, stones there and creepy cobwebs so it feels like you are exploring some place where no one was before. Voila! Done. Now is time to try the level. And at this very moment I witnessed the horror. All this time the melee enemies were set stationary (I knew that they will patrol the area and so I disabled their movement in order to test the various parts of the game quicker) and just now I set them to move. I don't know why but when they reach the destructible stones (or end of the platform) they just get stuck :( Oh well I guess I should have tested this before. Since there was no time to fix that I quess I have to ship the final game with this unpleasant bug. I also tweaked the damage numbers and behavior of the bosses. Their FOV is all around them (180°). They also don't move but they can bite and they will deal damage to you when you touch them. Otherwise I was quite happy with the level and I was ready to build it and upload here.

11.05.2021 - Final build + Shooting of the video - 1 hour

I quickly checked that everything is set as intended (I still fear that it isn't and I hope that it's just my paranoia and that there are no bugs or inconsistences in the game) and builded the game. Then after little bit of playing with OBS I finally found the right settings that ensured a good quality of the video. So I recorded it. Since I'm a bit shy and also because the first part of the level with the acid pools and jumping is a little bit tricky (so there was a possibility that I would die and such shameful moment can't be preserved in a video :D) I omited the commentary (when I'm looking on the wall of text I already wrote here I think that it is sufficient enough and that I should not waste your time any more). Upload on YouTube was smooth and you can check the final result here. With everything else complete only the journal entry was left to be done.

Final thoughts

Since this is the final version of this project I would like to write here some thoughts I have about the level.

On level implementation

I'm not sure what to think of the implementation. On one hand I think that the final version is quite nice and there are at least some of the mechanics from the design. On the other hand I would be happier if all of the design was implented here. I know that we were not supposed to finish it completely (if there wasn't enough time), but it still bothers me. I feel that I could do more in the time I had for the implementation. But the time was passing suprisingly fast. Thus level is incomplete now and I don't know how to feel about it. 

On level design

As I mentioned in the previous journal entry the design is pretty good. But during the implementation I found some flaws. First (and the most gamebreaking) is the two tiles high box that you need to push down in order to open the melee weapon checkpoint. If you push the box down it blocks the entrance to the checkpoint. Since you can only push the block it really obstructs you. Because of that I just make it a 1x1 box. Which also has a downside that you will push it to the wall and will be unable to drop it then. I'm also a bit confused about the proportions of the level. At first I assumed that the small 1x1 platform that zig zags around is there so you can reach the final boss. But when you pickup the melee weapon you can jump 9 tiles high so you actually don't need it. This is quite confusing to me since now this platform is quite redundant. Also with this jump height you can jump from the part with the two boxes right into the final boss arena. I don't know if this is intended but I think that it should be at least mentioned in the design (I'm talking about this part). And that's it. Now something not too much related to the design. When I was playing the level I was quite frustrated about the acid instakill. Also the two boxes you need to drop in order to open the door were giving me a headache. Maybe it's just because I'm bad at playing platformers in general or this level is actually pretty hard. Well you can try it and decide for yourself.

Note: I think that the design is really good in general. Here I'm just pinpointing some of the flaws I stumbled upon during implementation. This doesn't mean that I hate it or something like that. I know that I don't talk about positives of it here but I'm trying to make this text as short as possible (and I'm failing at it miserably as you can see).

Ok, that's it. If you made it here congratulations (as a reward you have my eternal gratitude for reading it). I apologize for such a long text but I wanted to write about all of the things that happened to me during the development. I hope it was at least a little bit interesting. :)