Devlog 2: Postmortem

Devlog 2: Postmortem

Successes

We found a lot of success with this project in a few different ways. For one we didn’t have a ton of experience making sound effects and sprites before this project. In this project Carter was able to get practice making sound effects and background music with FL Studio using MIDI piano software to create the beats and mix to create music and sound effects. Carter also was able to gain experience with making animations and sprites for the enemies and characters. He was able to create keyframes and set them up as animations in the project.

We also found a lot of success in the coding side of things with coding in the Enemy AI. We made two forms of basic enemy AI: Waypoint based and pathfinding. Both of these work well and give the enemies different functions to make the different enemies interesting to deal with when playing the game. Our Enemy Boss on the final level has more complex AI than the other enemies in the game and has different attack states that it cycles between to make the fight more unique and interesting.

Nick found a lot of success learning the new input manager for Unity, and using it to rebind controls in a setting page. He also had success experimenting with movement and getting it to feel intuitive, as well as getting controller support.

Jorge found a lot of success with creating the camera movement for the project and added in the tiling for the maps.

Challenges

Since this was our first project in Unity 2D we had some issues when it came to coding and programming our game in the 2D game engine. We had issues when it came to the tiling of our maps where the height of the different objects had to be 0.0001 in order for them to function correctly and not cause the player to get stuck. We also had issues with the Z axis since it normally isn’t a big factor in 2D development, but we had an issue where if our Z axis was not at least 0.5 then the sprites would not show up. This would also cause problems with our pathfinding where if objects weren’t on the same Z level then they would be unable to pathfind to the other objects. We also had issues with our enemies since due to the sprites and colliders attached to them and problems with the Z values sometimes our sprites and colliders would get detached.

We also had issues with our UI scaling based on different resolution sizes and making it work efficiently and smoothly with controller and keyboard input. We ran into issues with converting our UI elements to use keyboard input and controller input since the converted C# input manager class doesn’t natively include what the current control scheme is, so we had to just add both.

What we learned

In this project all of our members were able to learn a new skill in this project. Carter and Jorge were able to work with sprites and animations in order to bring life to the project and make the game more appealing to look at. Jorge was also able to learn how to use the camera and make the changing scenes flow well when developing the project.

Nick learned a lot about mapping controls to keyboard and to controller and dealing with UI interface to make sure all of these different control schemes work seamlessly with the project. He also learned a lot about coding 2D movement and how to adjust values to make it feel smooth.

Generally as a group we all learned a lot about enemy AI and how to make the enemies spawn and despawn as well as interact with the player to create meaningful interactions between the player and the enemies in the game.

Future Revisions

In future revisions of the project we would like to add more fluid animations to our project. Since this is our first time making animations for our 2d characters we were learning our footing so now that we have a bit more experience we think we could make more fluid animations going forward. We also would like to add more enemy types and have them have more attacks than just having their colliders interact with the player character. This would make the different encounters interesting and make each enemy feel unique from one another. With our new enemy types we would also like to make more levels, maybe in each of the different types of areas (Grassy, Carnival, Water, Castle) in order to flesh out each of the areas more. We also felt that it would be a cool addition to the game to also add more boss fights in the game either in the form of the same final boss that gets a new move with each new level or a unique boss for each area.

We also feel like we could improve on our feedback for the player with most aspects of our game. This could be in the form of more satisfying audio feedback or cool particle animations when we do certain actions in the game.