Journal Entry 6

Date: 11.05.2023

Activity: 

- Started working on the actual game at around 16:10. I placed the enemies, and adjusted the speeds of the moving platforms. Then, I placed the doors for the "Tower of Doors".

- At 17:30, I began the menial task of adding call-backs to the respective pressure pads. This took a while, since I had to do things I wasn't expecting, hence it ended at around 18:50 (with about 20 minutes of break throughout the whole thing).

- Finished the boss room at 19:40.

- Finished completely at 20:10, by adding checkpoints, acid pools, and tying up loose ends.

- Writing this journal entry at 20:20 something.

Notes:

Time to write some words because simply making the game isn't enough.

Most of the things are already written in the "Activity" part, so I'll talk about the "Tower of Doors".

Placing them was easy enough. However, it turns out that when the door is opened, there's a Sprite Mask which masks the door sprite from being shown. As I'm building a tower of doors, this caused a problem, because all the doors ended up being invisible. Also, while the doors were open (ie, not meant to be visible), their 2D colliders were still in effect, hence the player could walk on invisible steps and get to the final level by trial and error.

As a solution to both of these problems, I had to add two extra call-backs to each door. When opening the doors, I had to add:

- Animator.Play("DoorOpening")

- SpriteMask.enabled = true

- 2DCollider.enabled = false

When closing the doors, I had to add:

- Animator.Play("DoorClosing")

- SpriteMask.enabled = false

- 2DCollider.enabled = true

This worked for the most part. However, needless to say, it took some time, as there are 45 doors or something, so I had to add 45 * 3 * 2 = 270 call-backs by hand. Ouch. I had to switch my brain to monkey mode. There was probably a way of doing it via code, but in my experience, it would have taken way longer to figure that out. And since this was a one time thing, I believe I profited. Anyways.

Now, time for pictures:

The above is what the final level looks like. Pretty close to the design document, huh?

However, not quite. The above is a picture of the "Tower of Doors". In the design document, it appears I made a slight miscalculation about the widths and heights of doors, which caused the player to be unable to progress, as the jump strength wasn't enough at a certain point. I had to move some of the doors by 2 units below, which caused the last two doors at the top (on the sides) to be kind of useless, so I removed them. This wouldn't have been an issue if I could start working on the level, instead of drawing it first...

Regarding the "flat background colour VS scenery" issue... I decided to go with the background colour option. I picked an average RGB of the tile set's brown colour, and made it a little darker. I like this colour, as it doesn't disturb my eyes. The scenery option would have involved bright pink skies, which is just blinding. Also, this is kind of an odd level anyways, ie not your usual planet.

Still no reply from the professor. I'm just going to try and do this "changing the functionality of the weapon" thing and hope that it is gets accepted at this point...

Ok that's it for now. Again, as a final thing, I will share my TODO list:

TODO:

- Disabling all weapons at the start.

- Icons (or just use text? probably) to pick up weapon modes (and also the stick).

- Programming weapon modes (the "non-trivial custom code").

- Making the UI.

- Trailer video (I really hope I do not forget about this).

- Upload the trailer video (don't wanna forget about this either).

Invested Hours:

- 4 hours, 40 minutes working on the game.

- 15-20 minutes on the journal.

Outcome: 

1) Pretty much done game level. Time to start the programming stuff.

2) Obsolete journal entry #6.