Flappy Ship: A Two-week Tale... #2

The second and final week was upon us and things were looking good

Week 2:

Our goal for this week was to import the 3d models my partner had made and use them to create obstacles in the level.

Unity Versions, an updating nightmare

Now, I love unity don't get me wrong but why does it opt to install an older version than the most recent release? Why are the university computers on an old version...

When my partner and I met up to import the 3D assets, a good chunk of time was spent updating the project to the correct version, then when I got home, I installed a version that was too new so I had to update the project multiple times...

I will keep this in mind moving forward to ensure I don't do this in future projects

Collisions:

With new models comes new problems. After adding the new models to the game, we ran into an unexpected error. If the player does not move up or down, they can glide straight through without crashing. Although I didn't manage to fix this prior to the game jam, I realised after that if I set the rigid body collision detection to continuous speculative, which fixed it. Now that I know this I can implement it in future projects.

Some of the obstacles had a box collider originally, however this lead to some player deaths feeling unfair as it felt like the ship and the obstacle didn't appear to collide but still did. To fix this i gave some of the obstacles mesh colliders instead.

I also noticed after uploading it that I forgot to give one of the objects collisions, which is slightly embarrassing but is good to check for in future.

Lighting up the Cave:

After importing the Cave section of the level and adding some of the obstacles, the cave felt too dark so I decided to add some lighting around the obstacles to make them easier to see. After adding these lights, they weren't showing in play mode. So I tried a few different options, like increasing intensity and range of each light to see if they will appear. However, after a while I realised the issue was that I didn't give the lights the script so they move with the level so they were being left behind.

Speeding up the ship:

After meeting up, we both decided to increase the level movement speed in order to speed up the game and make the game slightly harder.

Deadlines: The bane of developers.

A few features we scrapped to save time:

• After the cave, we debated adding a cityscape area that the ship would have to traverse but ultimately we decided that would be too much work for a 2-week deadline.

• Endless level - Since we were making terrain and obstacles in the level differ, we decided it would have been difficult to procedurally generate the level and have it completable and have each part tile properly. This approach works well for Flappy Bird as the terrain is a flat surface and the only thing changing was the pipes but since we have a cave level as well as the flat grass area, making that tile properly seemed to be out of the 2-week scope so we decided to make a short, linear level.

• Speeding up in the cave - One of the ideas that I wanted to implement was a trigger that would cause the speed at which the level moved towards the player to increase as they entered the cave. My approach to this was to make an invisible object with a script that would detect collision with the player and tell the Script that handles the level moving to increase the movement speed variable. However, I was unable to figure out how to make the script communicate with the other script and I ran out of time to do this before the deadline so I removed it.

Conclusion of Week 2

Overall, this week mainly consisted of implementing code i wrote in week 1 and adjusting some components and settings. I feel that i didn't properly test the game prior to the submission date and didn't think about difficulty and player experience, which could have made the game a lot better.

Feedback Post-Submission

• 'increase in difficulty overall would have improved replay ability' A couple of players said that the cave section was too easy and it can be easily beat by staying in the middle of the cave. I believe that I was more focused on making the game playable rather than thinking of the difficulty, I will keep this in mind for future projects so that the game is more enjoyable.

• 'I didn't blow up at the end and just flew infinitely', which was a problem caused by collision detection, which I addressed in the Collisions section earlier.

• 'End screen and music would enhance the experience.', Looking back on the project, an end screen would have been a much better idea as it would give players a satisfying end to the level. As for music, I believe that is slightly above the scope for this project as I have never made music but I agree it would have made the level more enjoyable.

• Some players said that they felt that 'the game restarted too quickly or sometimes they didn't realise they had died.' Next time it might be a good idea to pause the game for those few seconds before reloading to show the death, so the player understands.