Don't Turn and the Year in Conclusion

Final Fixes before Deadline

The final week was upon us and the project was in a really good place but there were several small bugs that we wanted to address before we uploaded the game. Many were small and the fixes were relatively simple so I don't feel the need to write about them here as they didn't need much in depth thinking.

Mirror damage indicators.

In the game, we have indicators that show how much damage the player does or takes that spawn above the enemy like so:

This was originally a child object on whatever object is taking damage, however as we have it so when an object turns to face another direction, it changes the X scale of that object to -1, which causes the text to appear backwards like so:

I was in charge of fixing this, so my first idea was to simply flip the indicators x scale back, which did not work as it is not the indicators x scale which changes but the players. So instead, i wanted to create a left and right number, and depending on which way the player is facing, it will use a different one, as this is how I handled spawning the dash bullet on the correct side, however this still did not work as the text was still flipped. On reflection, starting one of the sides at a negative x scale may have worked but I didn't consider it at the time.

Eventually, I decided to scrap the current way it is in the scene and simply instantiate the number where object is, and destroy it after a few seconds. This created the effect we wanted.

    public void SpawnIndicator(float attackDamage, Color textColour)
    {
        spawnedDamageIndicator = Instantiate(DamageIndicatorPrefab, damageIndicatorSpawnPos.position, Quaternion.identity);
        damageIndicatorText =                             spawnedDamageIndicator.transform.GetChild(0).GetComponent<TextMeshProUGUI>();
        StartCoroutine(DamageIndication(attackDamage, textColour));
    }

    private IEnumerator DamageIndication(float attackDamage, Color textColour)
    {
        damageIndicatorText.text = attackDamage.ToString(); 
        damageIndicatorText.color = textColour;
        damageIndicatorText.gameObject.SetActive(true);
        yield return new WaitForSeconds(0.1f);
        Destroy(spawnedDamageIndicator);
        yield break; 
    }

}

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In Conclusion of Don't Turn and a Year of Game Development

Overall, this project has been a massive success in my eyes. There is still a couple of bugs that need to be ironed out before we submit to the graduate showcase but I am very proud of the teams progress. Especially considering we had a few members of the team not contributing throughout.

As for my personal progress, I feel there has been an immense improvement in my skill level as a programmer within Unity. Mainly as I am at a point, where when asked to think about a new system, I could roughly plan how it could be coded/function whereas at the beginning of the year this would not be possible. I have also gained confidence in expressing my opinions on the game towards the team and my teamwork in general has improved as my previous game jam had a lack of it.

Coming from barely knowing much about Unity when I started, I can safely say I have learnt so much. From actual coding techniques, such as coroutines, writing data to files, animation events, etc as well as coding practices, importance of comments, variable name standards, modularity of code. I have also improved in my ability to share my workload with others as at the beginning of the project I wanted to hoard all the tasks to myself, but I quickly realized I couldn't do that.

Over summer, I plan to continue improving my skills, by entering the GMTK game jam as well as working on my own projects. Mainly I want to write a movement script that I can use as a template for projects and is modular, as one of the things I would've changed in Don't Turn is the movement as it felt very floaty for such a dark game.