Crunch Time…
It is week 10 and seeing as we are required to record up to 3 minutes of gameplay, I decided that it would be in everyone’s interest to make the level playable from start to finish. There is still quite a lot to do in achieving this feat and so collaboration is crucial in helping us realise this.
Implementing the Cloud Ability in the Level
This week started with a mistake in which I was not aware that water was already implemented in the project assets after discussion several weeks ago. This took a load off my shoulders; however, I had already imported the Standard Assets Pack from the Unity Asset Store (Standard Assets (for Unity 2018.4), 2020). I ended up causing some issues on my end as it made the game impossible to play in Unity. After mentioning this to the team and panicking somewhat, the problem lied with the fact that the pack possessed sample scenes that had impacted what we already had.
Thankfully I could revert to how it was before using a previous commit in GitHub. The downside to this is that I had also made quite a few cosmetic changes to the level, and I had not saved or pushed these changes before the asset pack was imported. So, once the error had been rectified, these had to be redone. Lesson learned: commit and push changes more often.
I explained to Georgi that the water had to be selectable and that the material should have the possibility of being changed, but only to the cloud material which meant a new script had to be written on his side (sorry Georgi).
The water could only be resized by changing the dimensions within the ‘Water Volume (Box)’ found in the inspector, once I was satisfied, I would then add a box collider. If I were to make any changes after this point, then the box collider would have to be reset.
Then, simply the water would have to have its tag changed to ‘selectable’ – surprisingly, I have not mentioned this in previous posts, but this is the same way in which we permit players to change certain object’s materials in the game.
Georgi had very quickly devised the ‘Ability Restriction (Script)’ which was to be added as one of water’s components in the inspector, the ‘allowed abilities’ was set to ‘cloud’.
What came to a surprise was that because the cloud material is dense, it makes you float through rather than fall through which I kind of like! This ability could be used to mitigate fall damage in a later version of the game.
Hints Added
As stated in my last blog post, I was looking at creating hints for the sequential button presses.
The hints on the top level are straight forward and quite easy to work out, these hints are not very easy to spot at first as they are high above the buttons and not the biggest, but they consist of icons from the ability wheel that was created by both Luke and James early on. The buttons are to be pressed in the order that you unlocked the abilities. And seeing as this is a linear experience (for now), the player should not have too much difficulty in figuring this out.
Hint 1 – Bounce Material
Hint 2 – Metal Material
Hint 3 – Cloud Material
Rooms were also created on the bottom tier of the level in which there are three more hints (yin and yang, greed, and the doomsday clock) and a room which appears as a dead end, although this also has several hints: a small pit that has a reflective bottom as if it is damp, and slits on three of the sides.
Hint 1 – Yin and Yang
Hint 2 – Greed
Hint 3 – Doomsday Clock
Hint 4 – Damp Pit
Originally, we were envisioning that these hints simply be added to the level as decals, however, I thought that they would look better if they were 3D assets themselves. The way in which this was done, was that I had the ability emblems from the ability wheel as a reference and then built them from scratch with ProBuilder. They are not the same, but they are near-on identical.
Most are made of different shapes. And this includes the hints in the lower part of the level.
However, like with the Yin and Yang hint, this was created with a mixture of shapes and a ‘poly shape’. A poly shape consists of a series of vertex’s that when they are joined from beginning to end (like in dot-to-dot drawings you used to have fun with as a kid, or maybe you still do enjoy these… fair enough), it will provide you with the desired shape.
Button Triggers and Sequential Buttons
Now the prisms are tagged as ‘selectable and carriable’. This is self-explanatory; however, this carries over slightly from James’ level.
In Level 2, the player is tasked with changing materials of objects to traverse the level, but also tasked with changing materials of small boulders to metal which then activate buttons when the now metal boulders are placed on them around the map. There is a similar premise here to keep things familiar, but at the same time, it has been made more difficult it to give the player a fresh experience and thus the impression that it’s different and novel.
For now, the buttons on the top level have been placed and the ‘Weighted Button (Script)’ has been added to each. The required mass is 10 and the reason for this is that each of the button triggers with their initial material are worth 1, when the material is changed to metal, then they are worth 10 times as much, thus able to activate the button.
The Weighted Button (Script) calls the action of Button3 and the Ordered Button Trigger (Script) that is attached to it.
The Ordered Buttons (Script), which was devised by Georgi, on completion of the sequential button presses, calls the action of both playable directors on the lift and lift mechanic, which then calls the animators of these objects, thus the player can get to the bottom tier of the level.
The result is what I hoped it would be. It would be nice to add some sound effects too, but time is of the essence now.
Size Changes to the level
Giovanni suggested resizing the level more as it still takes a long time to get around, I have taken away a lot from the side rooms other than the one you spawn in and reduced the width and length by a quarter. The height has been reduced too to allow more light in to fill the space. At all times, I was asking for feedback from my peers on Discord to see what they thought, and we all agree that it is much easier to traverse now and makes it a whole lot less boring to play.
For Next Week
All that is left to do now is sort the puzzles underneath, sort the rest of the sequential button logic to trigger the water and water lift animations which I am wanting to add.
References
2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies
Discord. 2021. Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out. [online] Available at: https://discord.com/ [Accessed 21 August 2021].
Unity Asset Store. 2020. Standard Assets (for Unity 2018.4). [online] Available at: <https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/asset-packs/standard-assets-for-unity-2018-4-32351> [Accessed 21 August 2021].