Week 6 – Finalisation
Latest game features:
This week was a big week! The final week of university for this semester and it was crunch time. My goals for this week were to implement a boss fight and fix any remaining bugs. The boss fight was a completely new scene and with a completely new enemy. The grand boss fight of this game was changed at the last minute to be a mini-boss fight with a dragon instead of the SHADOW LORD as this felt more appropriate as the game didn’t expand to any further than a single level. I believe having a mini-boss fight and a “to be continued” scene better suited the size of the game.
The features of the dragon can be split up into three major parts:
- The dragon,
- The fireball,
- And the reward
The dragon animation was a pixel animation I had made prior to making this game. It felt suiting to implement a dragon as a mini boss because of the freedom in their movement and the explanation for why they give you so many gold coins. The movement of this dragon was unlike other enemies as it had to be able to fly and allow the player to increase distance without letting them escape too far. This dragon flies towards the player but when too close, the dragon flies away again, repeating these actions and resulting in an interesting hover motion where the dragon follows the player without overlaying them.
The fireball is the chosen attack method for the dragon and deals a dangerous blow to the player. The fireball shoots towards the player and disappears when colliding with the player or the platform. I added a particle effect to the flame to create a bit more of an animation.
The reward for defeating the dragon is all the dragon’s life savings (a maximum of 250 gold coins) and a portal that returns you to the Start Menu where you can decide to continue exploring, start a new game, or conclude the game. There’s also a credits scene too.
This week the Old Merchant’s store also got an update so the prices for upgrades double each level as this was suggested with the feedback from last week. The Heads Up Display (HUD) was also improved to better represent your condition and stats and a visual representation of damage was also made, both in response to the feedback gathered from the survey.
Bug fixes:
There were quite a few remaining bugs that needed to be fixed but I couldn’t remember all of them when writing this post. The major issue was how the player started with dealing zero damage to enemies making it impossible to defeat anything unless they found enough treasure chests to then purchase the first upgrade. This was fixed in this update.
After making interactable objects to be interacted with by pressing R, there was a few logic errors that resulted in the wrong object being used. For example, when standing next to the Old Merchant and clicking on the first portal, you would instead interact with the Old Merchant. This was also fixed in this update.
Enemies would also hurt the player when they were close enough to logically hurt the player, resulting in some confusion when game testing. This was surprisingly easy to fix once I found what the issue was.
Difficulties:
The big development for this week also came with its challenges. Some were overcome but some were too great and had to be compromised.
Restructuring the Old Merchants prices was a challenge as I am not too great at creating mathematical functions that fit the desired cost increase and then to also find out how much of a refund should be returned is the second part of the challenge. I did require some help from my peers, and I eventually understood the maths side of things to then implement it into my game.
After improving the HUD, I discovered that it wasn’t properly displayed in Itch.IO. The icons were out of the screen and adjustment were needed to be made to the display screen size. Now Itch.IO shows the full screen in full-screen mode.
One challenge that had to be compromised was rotating the fireballs to be directed to where they were shooting. I had tried researching how to achieve this but later realised I had spent too much time on it and decided to continue on to the next task. This will be something I want to explore at some point as it would be really helpful, but the fireballs will not be changed in this game.
To have a visual representation of the player being damaged, the player would flash a red colour just like the enemies do. Changing the colour of an object appeared simple but was quite challenging to get the right colour. For some unknown reason, I couldn’t see any change in player colour when I set a red value and blue or green values. This may have been due to my perception of the object, but I was forced to only change the red value. I am happy with the results, but this issue is something I would like to explore further just to understand what I did wrong.
Feedback:
This week’s feedback mainly regarded the Old Merchant and was the reason why the Old Merchant was restructured. After implementing the boss fight, it was found that the game was far too quick and easy to complete, and it was suggested that the prices of the Old Merchant double each upgrade instead of increasing in increments of 10. I agreed with this feedback and began improving it immediately.
References:
PlayerPrefs methods - https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/PlayerPrefs.DeleteAll.html
Vector3 magnitude method - https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Vector3-magnitude.html
Converting float to int - https://forum.unity.com/threads/converting-float-to-integer.27511/
SetColor method - https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Material.SetColor.html
Math power methods - https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mathf.Pow.html
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