Don't Turn.. #2

The goal of these 2 weeks was to prepare a playable prototype that we can playtest and get feedback on mechanics

Week 3:

Respawning the player:

This task involved building upon a checkpoint system written by another programmer and allowing the player to respawn at these checkpoints when their health reaches 0. On top of this, I added the ability for the game to save when the player reaches the checkpoint.

I set up the code so when the game is started, the players position is set to the location of the last checkpoint touched. This created a small problem that when the player begins a new game, they haven't touched any checkpoints yet. I avoided this by creating a spawn point at the beginning and checking if last checkpoint was null and if it was, find the spawn point location in the level.

Combining Features to prepare for the prototype build:

Part of preparing the prototype was to combine all the code from our separate testing scenes into one main game scene.

The main issue I encountered is that the pause menu allows the player to return to the main menu and then reload into the game. This causes many of the references to the player to break in between scenes.

To get around this, I added a 'find with tag' line whenever the scene is loaded to get another player reference.

Week 4:

Triggering the End:

The end of the starting area has a trigger to inform the player that the playtest is over and direct them to the feedback form. Since this was a temporary feature, i just added a simple on trigger enter function that enabled the canvas with text on. After doing this and returning to other work, I noticed the end screen would pop up by itself without the player being near. This was because enemies had a chance to wander into the area and trigger it.

To avoid this, I added a check to the on trigger enter that checked if the object's tag that entered the trigger had the 'Player' tag and if so, will then show the end screen.

Dash:

A short dash forward that also shoots a bullet in the behind direction.

Cooldown

This ability could be spammed if the player continually pressed the key. The dash was already contained within a coroutine, so it was just a matter of adding in a wait until seconds command that acted as the cooldown for the ability.

Multi-firing

This introduced a separate bug where now if the player spams the key, the dash plays on time however, multiple bullets are spawned. I fixed this by simply only allowing the Dash Ability coroutine to continue if the player can shoot and can dash Booleans were true to avoid multiple spawn bullets to be 'queued' up and executed when the cooldown was finished.

NPC to unlock Abilities:

We don't want the player to instantly have access to all abilities, which would overwhelm them. So instead we wanted the player to slowly unlock them by interacting with an NPC.

My first approach for this was to make an event when dialogue is ended that the unlock ability script could subscribe to and trigger. My main reasoning for this was to avoid coupling the code to each other by relying on references. However this method caused all NPCs with the script to unlock their abilities when dialogue finishes. I thought about having the current NPC the player is talking to subscribe at the start of Dialogue but the reference to the current NPC wasn't being set properly so couldn't subscribe to the event.

Ultimately, I decided that getting the feature functional was most important for the prototype so I used a direct reference to the unlock ability script and called the function. Looking back, though I should not have settled for this and instead looked up how to achieve what I wanted

New Ground Check for animations:

Adding in player animations was mostly straightforward until I got to the jump animation, which would start when you press the key then instantly switch back afterwards. This was caused by the check to determine if the player was grounded flipping from false back to true shortly after jumping, I wasn't sure why this was happening so I opted to alter the way it was checked. I used this video to implement this feature. This fixed the bug and allowed the character to jump while the correct animation plays.

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References

Code Monkey (Director). (2019, September 11). 3 ways to do a Ground Check in Unity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3iEl5AwUF8