This week was centered around getting level implementation ready as soon as possible for the playable alpha version of the game. It also had me shifting my design plan around the starting area of the tower after some feedback from the team lead Jon.
Programming
This week I focused on iron out some of the logistics of scene switching by fixing bugs I had failed to notice in the previous week. The first being that if the player went back to the spawn room the character would duplicate itself endlessly, as seen below.
I realized quickly that the cause of this glitch was the fact that Unity was reloading the spawn room which already had a player prefab in it, this combined with the portal code not deleting the portal after confirming the transitions between scenes thus causing the room to reload over and over again lead to the player being duplicated endlessly.
For right now I went with the simple fix and had Unity find all game objects with the tag "EssentialObjects" and then destroy the second object to prevent the duplication. In the future I plan to implement a system where the player prefab just spawns in the room I choose to start it. However due to the time constraints I have right now this will suffice.
I also adjusted the Switch Scene enumerator as it now checks for something called destination portal. It is a means of identifying which portal each one is linked to between rooms.
Here we can see the right portal and it's scene that it goes to is 1.
Here we can see the left portal and it's scene that it goes to is 2.
However the destination portals are different because how the code determined which portal to go to when changing scenes before was done by checking the portals in the scene and going to the first one that wasn't the one the player walked into originally. This caused problems if there are multiple portals in the same scene, so the destination portals allow the player to go to the correct portal location. Here is a video of the scene switching working properly.
Github
I was also in charge of merging the two separate branches Jon and I were working on together. It ended up being a little bumpy as I had turned the player into the prefab and they hadn't yet which lead to a lot of his work needing to be reimplemented on my the prefab I had made. However in a quick voice call we iron out the problems and resolved the issues.
Level Design
This week I had to redesign a large chunk of the starting area as it was found to not be vertical enough for the feel of the tower.
This was the the problem section from last week and below is what it has been adjusted to this week.
Now the room location is 4 rooms high allowing for a much more vertical feel before the player leaves the starting area. This starting area is taking me a bit longer than I'd like but I think once we have it ironed out and cemented the rest of the tower will be quicker to level design for.
Reflection
I feel behind but I know I am also making decent progress at the same time. Overall I feel a bit overwhelmed but also excited by level design however I think I am excited for implementation. Programming and working with Unity even as things break is enjoyable for me and they keep me excited about this project. Hopefully next week I will have some playable scenes, plus the last two rooms for the starting area done as well as look around for some play testers. Come back next week for more exciting updates!
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