Fighting Game Project - Grinding Gears... #3

My goal for the fourth and final week:

To implement a round system that either ends with a player falling our of the 'blast zone' or the timer reaching zero, pause menu that allows players to return to the main menu and pre-round countdown.

Round System:

My main goal for this week was to implement a round system, similar to fighting games such as Street Fighter, however the round would end by falling off the stage and out of the 'blast zone', an area around the stage which acts as a death box for players, idea for which was taken from Super Smash Bros Series.

I found this task very difficult as I had not done anything similar to this before and i struggled to find any online help to make it so I had to code it myself from scratch.

This script checks to see whether the round timer has finished, in which case neither player wins. Also it checks if one of the players has won/ the timer has ran out (Check for player win is later on).

Checking who won the round using OnTriggerExit2D:

Very simple piece of code that checks the tag of an object when it stops colliding with an invisible trigger box on the stage and then sets the Boolean of the other players win to true, since them exiting the box means they fell off the stage and died.

I have temporary Debug logs here because I was having an issue with the wrong player being given a point, which ended up just being a mistake from me when I copied and pasted the first case statement I forgot to change p2win to p1win..

Triggering next Round:

This if statement checks which Boolean is true, then subtracts 1 from the number of rounds remaining and sets that to a variable in Player Preferences(A place to store variables in between scenes loading), so it can be recalled when the scene is reloaded.

It also sets the Win Boolean back to False to avoid the score being increased multiple times.

It adds one to the respective players score and sets that in another Player Pref variable.

Then Triggers the Check rounds left Method, which literally checks if the rounds left is less than one or not. If it is, the Win screen is triggered. If not then the current scene is reloaded

I had some trouble coming up with how to reset the scene. Originally I wanted to avoid using Player Prefs and Scene manager because I was relying on Player prefs all over my code and it felt like a bad habit. However, Resetting all the locations and variables to their original state seemed like a pain and with only a week left, I wanted to make something usable.

Pause Menu:

This feature felt pretty simple to implement. All I mainly had to do was set the time scale to 0 and display the menu.

I did run into a very minor problem where I couldn't select each option. This was because the HUD Panel and the Pause menu both had a graphic ray caster component. The HUD did not need this functionality as there was nothing to interact with on the screen, so I just disabled that and it worked fine.

Pre-Round Countdown: Scale

Another Issue i had came from the Pre-Round countdown code interacting with the Pause Menu that made it so the main round timer continued to go down. This is because I am checking whether the pre round countdown is done in update and if it is done, timescale is constantly set to 1, so even though the pause menu will set timescale to 0, it is just being changed back again. To fix this I am calling the is Paused Boolean from the pause menu script every frame and checking whether that is false, if it is false, then the pre round countdown code can execute.

Final meeting: Day before Deadline:

So after realising that our artist and producer were not going to contribute anything as they made no effort to properly contact us, we decided to take matters into our own hands and meet up to put the work we did have together..

The only time everyone was free however was the day before the deadline, which was slightly worrying.

Final product content cuts:

After we met up and showed what we had worked on, it became apparent that there was some miscommunication and no-one had worked on an attack system. We decided that one night was not enough time to come up with attack systems so had to change the main premise of the game to make it simpler and doable in one night.

One of the programmers pitched an idea of a 'Tag' Game, which seemed very doable. In the time we were with each other, the designer and one of the programmers worked on simple level designs, another programmer made a 'tag' attack and i made indicators to go over the players heads to differentiate if players picked the same sprite.

Now one of the problems in this project is that i did not set up proper source control early in the project so by the time it was near the end of the project we did not have enough time to combine our work into a single GitHub repository, so we had to use memory sticks and assign one person to combine the work. This meant that after we left each other, we didn't get a chance to see the final project before it was uploaded and after downloading the game from the itch page i saw that a lot of the menu's i had worked on had been cut out.

My level select, character select, player death by exiting trigger and player indicators i made were all completely gone from the final project as each player was simply given a single sprite with different colours and the level was random from a list, player score was allocating by being the person not 'Tagged' at the end if the round.. The round timer for some reason was also not linked to the option I had made in the settings menu and the music the programmer had implemented did not work with my volume slider.. I also felt that there was a theme mismatch with the steampunk style menus and fonts with the pixel art bird players, however it works for a game basically stitched together overnight.

I can only assume that the programmer didn't understand my code and simply decided it would fit better without them as I didn't comment my code properly.

Final product Conclusion:

Overall, I'm disappointed with the game we made as it did not live up to the original game we envisioned. I also feel disappointed that 2 of the menus I spent the longest on are not in the final project.

For future problems, if I think there may be a scheduling/management issue, I should try my best to make sure either me or someone else is able to fill that role so we do not have a panicked final week and i should make more of an effort to communicate what i am doing with my team so we can ensure we do not miss anything that needs to be in the game, like an attack system..

However this project did provide some interesting challenges to overcome and I definitely think it was a valuable experience.

Feedback received:

The main feedback that was relevant to my code was that some of the options didn't work, like the volume, graphics and round timer. The programmer with the project file said he would fix these and in the updated version, he removed all the problem settings and just left the ones that worked, which I'm not sure was the best option but I couldn't access the project file. The graphics setting wouldn't have affected much anyway so that one is fine to be removed however I think being able to control the volume of the music is quite important because the music is quite loud for me, I also think giving the player freedom over how long rounds are is important.