Final Touches of the Caverns Level
There was a number of things to complete this week in addition to the pitch, I was still in catch up mode when it came to the level design.
First I had to make it possible for the player to reach the next set of puzzles in the lower tier of the level. I decided on ledges that spiral around and make it possible to get down safely. Ultimately I decided to extrude the triangulated inner faces of the pipe that makes up the second half.
However, I tried to make it as impossible as I could for the player to jump down into the rooms from the top as this would make the game far easier to complete, I did this by adding sloped edges and extruded frames so that the player would fall to their demise if they tried this method.
I was curious as to whether we could make it possible to include a death zone. Georgi wrote a script that when paired with a box collider, would teleport the player back to the top where the lift ends up. With the fog that I added earlier, I paired the 'death zone' with it so that when the player fell into it, they would 'respawn'.
Making the buttons work sequentially for the second part of the level was not much different from the top tier. Although I did get a little confused as I was not aware that the Ordered Button (Script) could be a component of any object in the level so long as it calls the required action.
I utilised the same method as before when it came to animating the water and water lift and what I had visualised weeks before worked better than I thought it would. What I did was change the final position of the water to ascend slowly whilst shortly after, the water lift would descend. Which would allow the player, after changing the water into cloud, to pass through and make their way to the final part of the level.
To make the level a little more difficult to complete I made it so the button triggers (prisms) were not in the most obvious places. Thus adding to the play time and forcing them to be more experimental and observant .
Lastly, it was a case of animating the chest lid in the centre of the final room and assigning a Cinemachine Trigger Action (Script) that would recognise when the player walks through the Box Collider which then calls the action for the chest lid to open. Again, the Timeline Keyframe Animation method was used and it was simply a case of a slow and slight rotation over the course of several seconds.
I added a point light for when the chest lid opened, the last collectible would appear godly. The issue lied with the fact that it was difficult to stop the light from bursting out through the bottom of the chest whilst still keeping its luminosity. This required careful positioning within the chest and a delicate playfulness of the options in the inspector.
Bug fixes
There were a few bugs left that we were able to fix, this included an issue with the player sometimes not being able to pick up the prism button triggers unless on a certain side of them and within a certain range. This was solely down to the pivot not being centralised. This was fixed by simply by clicking on the object itself and in the ProBuilder menu selecting 'center pivot'... Easy.
There was also an issue with the water in that it kept crashing the game when appraoching it. I tried resizing the water which made some improvement but did not eradicate the issue. What finally fixed this issue was the debugger had to be disabled in the inspector. (I still believe that this issue could have also been partially caused by my integrated graphics card not being up to scratch but what can you do? Scalpers everywhere!)
Remaining Bugs
There were two flaws that we didn’t get around to fixing and these are that you can take the prisms from the top part of the level in the second part to be used in the lower tier of the level as they are not locked in. I would have liked them to be solidly locked in place upon completing the puzzle.
Another issue is that the prism button triggers can be dropped into the fog and then will be stuck there permanently. We were hoping to add similar logic to them to what the player has in the sense that they would respawn in their original positions but we just ran out of time.
Pitch Presentation
Other than the odd stutter from each of us, the presentation went really well. I would have liked to help out more with the user research aspect as I feel like I have limited myself to the creative aspects of the pitch, but nonetheless, despite my continuous problems, I believe our team was quite formidable in getting things done. I would argue that communication needs to be improved. Although it is difficult when everything is online and it is not possible to meet in person. Emails would have been a more fool proof form of communication and allow for correspondence to be easily referred to. Conversations are very easily lost within Discord and the countless chats. As planned, we decided to record our presentation in zoom in which we had several practice runs before the final thing.
Gameplay Recording and Somewhat Accidental User Testing
The recording of the levels and menu could have gone better on my part as the software I used struggled to properly record the gameplay at a good framerate in comparison to James' recording of Level 2, and Luke's recording of the menus. Upon trying to import gameplay to Adobe Premiere Pro, there was an issue with my gameplay recording for the caverns level. This was recorded in engine and so I made a build of the level and tried that but my laptop just seemed incapable. I had no choice but to ask someone with a better setup to record it for me so I could edit it. In the end Luke took on this responsibility of recording for the final edit. What I did was allow him to play the level through without any guidance initially as I knew they had not played it all the way through before. Needless to say he struggled and sooner or later I had to intervene and guide him through how it works. The first part of the level he had no trouble with, it was more the final part of the level. I explained that it is a case of finding the prisms and putting them on the buttons in the correct order. The order is: Yin and Yang, Greed, and then Doomsday. Then the water fills a small pit which activates the water lift. You must turn the water into cloud to pass through it, once you reach the chest at the end, it opens and this is where there is meant to be a choice as to whether you would like to keep the powers you have acquired.
As we already knew there was a bug. Luke had to switch to the scene view when the prisms fell into the fog to move it back up. This would be my next immediate fix after the module ends as it is most certainly not ideal for players as it is essentially game breaking.
Creating the final video
As I have experience with film and video editing, I opted to edit the presentation and the gameplay elements.
First off, I replaced the teaser in the pitch with the original video file as through zoom it appeared glitchy and stuttered a lot.
Gifs of the game mechanics also stopped working when presenting and so these had to be replaced with little videos in post also.
Another factor I noticed, was that there was no contact information for us at the end which is one of the most important parts of a pitch and so I made sure to add our names and email addresses. This way any potential publishers could get in contact with us.
And finally, the decision was made to include the 3 minute gameplay demonstration within the presentation as I believe it would add to the immersion and give us the ability to show and tell so that those watching would not have to refer to a separate video.
References
- 2021. Adobe Premiere Pro CC. California: Adobe, Inc.
- 2021. Unity. San Francisco: Unity Technologies