Week 4 – Summarising the Major Game Loop

Delver » Devlog

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Latest game features:

This week the upgrade features were fully implemented, and chests were added to the game for additional gold. The player can now face the dangers of the dungeon knowing their upgrades from the old merchant do improve their chances of progressing through the game. There are currently three features able to be purchased; upgrades to the player’s attack damage, upgrades to the player’s maximum health, and the ability to dash. All purchases can be partially refunded if the player desires to swap upgrades in one feature for improvements in another. Each upgrade increases the current feature by one and the cost of the upgrade increase by 10 gold, creating the desired parabolic price increase for the upgrades. There is no maximum level in the attack and health features meaning the player can choose to power up themselves as much as they want before facing the Shadow Lord.

Chests were created and implemented in the game as a reward for exploring new places within the level and a solution to the little amount of gold found in the level. They can be seen with a glowing light around them and when touched by the player, they burst open with gold coins.

Bug Fixes:

Previously, only the goblins could damage the player, this was fixed so now all enemies hurt the player when attacking.
The enemies also dealt damage to every frame resulting in an instant killing of the player, this was fixed by adding a delay between attacks.

Difficulties:

The puzzling task this week was working out how to disable a button. A very simple task that took me far longer than needed. I discovered there are three popular methods to disable a button:

Disable the ability to click the button.
Disable the ability to click the button and change the look of it.
Remove the button entirely.

For this game I wanted to disable the button and change its look, except for quite a while it didn’t work. After a bit of trailing and researching any solutions, I discovered I had forgotten to import Unity Engine UI into the script. Unity Engine UI allows the code of the buttons to communicate to objects such as buttons and I didn’t have that link, thus preventing me from doing anything to the buttons. All the buttons work as desired now.

Feedback:

Some feedback given this week was the fact that it was unclear how a player is supposed to interact with interactable objects. As of now, the player interacts with the world by clicking on objects and then them acting the way they should after being clicked. I strongly agreed with this feedback and will allow the player to press the x button when close to the object.

It was also commented that the jump strength was too high and I understand that the jump strength and movement speed may be a little strong but I also feel that it is too close to the final due date for the game production to change as this would require an almost entirely new level design for level 1.

Features soon to be introduced: