I'm Excited!

I'm Excited!

This week I ended up tackling 2 big things.... And only one of them was planned!

To start things off, while tinkering with the level design, I found out that the playtest view I was using wasn't 16:9 AND the game UI didn't scale with the screen size! So, the first couple of days this week were spent learning Unity's weird anchoring system for things to scale with screen resolution. I still don't understand it, but though trial and error Lancer now works in 1080p all the way to  4k! WOW!!! (as long as the ratio is 16:9 otherwise the sides get cut off...)

After going down that rabbit hole, I finally got to work on the level progression. After working on everything else, it was fairly easy to write a program that checks is all the enemies are dead and then does...something. Then, I made that something be open up an exit! The exit is actually always there, but it"s blocked by a piece of wall that fits into the hole in the ceiling. Once all the enemies are dead, the ceiling plug is destroyed using the same exact function that destroys the bats. Getting the golden platform to appear was a bit trickier, but I finally figured out how so spawn it in. Now I can make almost ANY game object appear from code!

Most of that wasn't too hard... then I had to actually load the next level. This was ANNOYINGLY hard to code. First, I had to use an entirely new library (using System.IO) to get all the level files in the "scenes" folder. I wanted to just put all the levels in a list and select one at random, except for the current level. Unity had other plans. First, there are TWO different ways to create a list of information. You can either use a "List" or an "Array". Something about C# and JavaScript....blah, blah, blah.... what it means for me is that I have to get the files as an Array and THEN add that Array to a List so that I can find the current level in that list and make sure it isn't loaded again. Throw in a couple of hours of me trying to figure out why it isn't working because I forgot to put in the full file path or a backslash, and that's how this week went!

Still, I'm really excited for the next couple of weeks because I feel like I'm finally at a point where I can tinker and adjust things to make the game  FEEL  better. Up till now, it's felt like I'm just trying to get things functional: have a character that moves, an enemy that hurts, a hook that grapples, etc. But now, I'm at a point where I have a skeleton of a game and now get to work on actual game design. For instance, the player jumps... Great! Now, why does he jump the way he does? Should it be higher or lower? How does it  FEEL to jump? Going forward, I think it's going to be a lot more of these kinds of questions that I have to answer every week. One of which I'm already thinking about.

First thing I noticed after adding the new levels and enemies is that I mostly just stay on the ground and attack the bats. Maybe some jumps here and there, but almost no grappling. This is bad. Right now, the game doesn't give much of a reason to grapple. I'm not sure exactly how to tackle this, but I have two ideas. 

Make the level bigger

Different enemies

Having a bigger level might encourage the player to grapple more out of necessity, and a bigger space makes it feel less punishing for a missed grapple. The second idea, different enemies, comes from the fact that the bats will just come to the player. What's the point of moving if I can hit the bats at a range and stay safe? I don't know which idea is better. I will probably end up using a combination of the two. But, I'm excited to be at a point where I can ask these questions!

P.S. Oh Yeah! I made some crazy bats to show off to my little brother. Took longer than it needed to, but they're COOL!!!