Development Log 4 (Health System and final touches)
Health System
After implementing all the visual elements into Unity, I then programmed the life system where the player gets 3 lives which respawns them at the last checkpoint they got, or if they lose all 3 of their lives, they will restart the level entirely. I also got the music to play more tracks depending on how many lives the player had to give them more of a sense of urgency if they are on their last lives.
Final Level Designs
After all the coding was complete, I then designed each level, making sure to utilize the universe-shifting ability as effectively as possible. I created a short tutorial level to get the player’s using the normal controls before I introduced the main mechanic of the game. I made sure to introduce everything slowly so it wouldn’t confuse the player. However, later on in the level, I used the trial and error technique to get the player thinking about how they would complete each puzzle.
Menu System
The next thing I wanted to achieve was a working menu system as this would be the landing page of the game and would essentially give the first impressions. The menu is complete with music which switches with a parameter within FMOD. Once the player selects ‘Start’ I added an animation where the character would scurry across the page acting as a loading bar which gives a nice sense of interaction for the user
Final Player Testing
One small issue I had with my game when I gave it out to some friends, is that the music drowned out the sound effects the player character made which I didn’t pick up on myself as my system’s volume was naturally low. Therefore, I went into FMod and turned down the volumes of the music tracks which fixed this problem.
Another Issues which became apparent is that you could jump on vines as the vines were parented under the world asset. To fix this, I added a tag to the ladders which overrides the parent object. Once I made this fix, the player was then unable to jump on the vines.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I enjoyed creating this game and concept. Despite not finishing the game to the full extent I was hoping for, I was happy with the work I produced. With better project planning, I would have hoped to add animations to the characters to give more visual flair, as well as a paralaxing background which I intended on adding. I was very surprised at how well this concept worked and the potential the game has, if it was made into a longer game.