Projects ABC, Actual

Preamble

During this semester, I set on creating souls-like 2D adventure game mostly out of desire to implement a satisfying parry mechanic. Did I succeed? It's complicated.

The important part of my development journey was the fact that for the non-trivial amount of time I was ill, some time of it even out of reach of my computer and thus the project, so some parts of the game were significantly simplified to trade for the lost time.

Due to my absence on lectures I also misunderstood some parts of assignments, which I, hopefully, remedied by this project.

I was in contact with teacher about these issues via mail and I hope they won't hinder my ability to complete this course.

Project A

• Activity
  • I've created a simple One page design, that remotely resembles parts of three levels that are included in the final game.
  • I thought about adding pickups/heals (and they are implemented in the game) but since mechanics are quite forgiving, I decided to leave them out and just heal player upon respawning
  • I wanted one dynamic enemy to fight with - That ended up being the Knight
  • I wanted one static enemy (or trap) that player can't fight against, but which serves as a hazard throughout the level - That is the ArrowTrap
  • Finally I wanted to have some dynamic parts of the world, that are not bound to the tilegrid, so I added a classic floating platform to the mix
• Notes
  • At this point, I was already working on the project, since I started this as a personal project and then realized that Project B wasn't about scripting walkthroughs. As a result, the project was quite ambitious with quite nice assets, animations, effects and all.
• Invested hours
  • Since I already had some ground set, thinking of the features and setting them in plane wasn't that long. Also, I'm sort of spent up ex-graphic designer and I don't really enjoy working on design anymore, so, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't planning on putting too much effort into the visuals. I feel like once I get from the "learning" projects to the stuff I will want to actually sell to people, I either get someone who'll enjoy drawing pictures for me, or I'll be better motivated to do it myself - As of now, I want to get into game development - multimedia stuff I already have a maturita from.
    • 1+ hour brainstorming features
    • 1+ hour level design on paper
    • ~1 hour photoshop stuff
• Outcome
  • One Page Design and solid idea for the finished product

Project B

• Activity (and Notes)
  • For this part, I mainly were implementing BUNCH of features, attaching animations and scripting around long enough to have enough pieces to build an enjoyable level.
  • I quite enjoyed attaching methods to animations, easing calling them in the right time, but this luxury wasn't always possible - parry is called purely from code and I think you can feel the difference.
  • I kinda hate the way you need to do movning/floating platforms in Unity - at least as far as I found out - The fact, that I need to add my hero as a child to platform when I touch it creates a need to cache previous parent for cases where it matters - like if my hero shouldn't be destroyed on Load
    • This also causes one of known bugs which i, quite frankly, just didn't care enough to fix for the sake of meeting at least some of my deadlines
  • At this point I also added some pickups, but in the end decided to not use them. They were pretty much the copycat of the scripting tutorial ones, so nothing note-worthy probably
  • Creating more sophisticated projectile was fun - not only did I want to use the sprites I had, without the need of rotating them in Photoshop, but I wanted the feature of climbing over arrows stuck into the wall. This created the need for separate colliders for damage dealing and climbing. I also added some trails and particles for the good measure and some additional flare.
  • Close quarters combat just didn't feel quite right from the beginning, so I focused more on the jumping part. I didn't really find time to attend this, so swordfighting still feels kinda miserable.
• Invested hours
  • Like... several days of time. Close to two weeks on & off.
  • During this part I also went through the apex of being sick and traveled out of Prague for few days, rendering me unable to work
• Outcome
  
  • Demo level in my game, including some sound effects and object interaction (attack knockback etc.)
  • Also my "sample" level including every feature next to each other for efficient testing (not in final game)

Project C

• Activity (and Notes)
  • This is where things went downhill. Stuff like scene transitions between levels and respawns, handling persistency between scenes without making multiple of some stuff that should be singular, polishing level design... Everything was so tedious and painful, that I had to force myself into working. Worst thing that could happen was discovering some severe issue once I finally (and rarely) got into the flow. My motivation during the final stretch was unbelievably low.
  • I designed one Tutorial level and three standard levels with transitions, that are based on my One page design concepts
  • I created ingame UI using UI Toolkit and hooked it to the hero
  • I created the pause menu, Credits (where are sources of all the assets) and Settings (which hosts just the sound volume)
    • I did all my UI, except for in-level hints in Tutorial level, using Unity's UI Toolkit, which was really familiar and similar to HTML and CSS styling, but there were some major issues.
    • Main issue is the sort order of the UI documents, since only the top-most is getting the mouse events (and partly non-deterministically), which I spent ages on researching while debugging. My in-game UI was above my pause-menu, so pause-menu didn't respond (but just most of the time). Nightmare.
    • Second issue was that the order and speed of loading scripts at preview and at build varies, so in-game UI elements wouldn't update, because Hero singleton wasn't yet created, or vice versa, throwing errors all over the place. (Tale of debugging this could be traced on the course discord server)
  • I fixed some details with projectiles and Arrow Trap
  • I worked on block and parry mechanic, from which only the latter made it to the final prototype
  • I added rest of the sound effects and music
    • There is still a bug with music transitioning from intro part of the song to the loop, where the whole game freezes for the moment. I tried to fix this with multiple alternating Sound Sourcees, but to no avail. In the future, one should do it using scheduled play, which doesn't cause the lag, but I couldn't be bothered. 
  • General fit & finish from which I probably forgot a decent part of what I wanted to do before building, but hey, that's gamedev I guess.
• More notes
  • During this part I found multiple weaknesses in my code design, for which it was too late in the process to be fixed - but it probably thought me a lot for the future projects

• Invested hours
  • Due to the demotivation probably around the same, if not more than with project B.
  • Solid 2-3 weeks on & off, several days pure.
• Outcome
  • Finished "game" (As a gamer I'd rather call this just prototype, since there are too much "learning" mistakes, that the whole thing has more holes than a block of cheese)
  • At this point I knew that this project was way to ambitious for this course and at my game developer level. My C# skills were up for the challenge, but the creative stuff and constant fiddling with parameters, sliders, coordinates and timings or state machines almost drew me crazy.
  • Most important thing this course thought me is that I'm not, probably never will be, nor want to be, full stack game developer. I enjoy programming of the game mechanics and brainstorming new features, trying what works and what doesn't - I absolutely hate the finishing, tying stuff together and level design (same as any other design)