Introduction

Throughout this past week I have made a basic level design for my game. I have also refined the player controls a bit.

The level

My game is set on a road in the middle of the desert. On the road there will be obstacles to avoid, and on the surrounding deserts there will be rocks, shrubs, cacti and signs. In the previous devlog, you would've seen my tilemap. Here it is again:

I was adding this into the game, using the tutorial for help, when I realised I forgot a feature of tilemaps. You can place one tilemap on top of another, and if the first tile map has some transparent pixels, the tilemap beneath them will be shown. Realising this, I made a copy of the tilemap and altered it so that only the decorations appear:

As I covered the screen with tilemaps, I noticed a problem. There were horizontal and vertical lines going through them, coloured by the adjacent tiles on the tilemap:

Reading the tutorials, it said that some blank tiles surrounded the tilemap to prevent this problem (or at least that's how I interpreted it). So I tried that and the problem still occurred. During a tutorial, I asked Ian for some help. He said that he would extend some pixels so that the sprite editor won't pick up the other tile. I didn't really know how to do this, so Ian ultimately sent his altered version of the sprite sheet to me.

This mostly fixed my issue. There are still two lines going down the screen, and Ian admitted that it won't entirely fix my problem. I think it's the best that can be done for now.

After this problem was fixed, I made the rest of my level, and added a virtual camera so that it could scroll. Or at least, I tried to, before I realised that the Cinemachine assets weren't installed by default. I installed it, and implemented a camera that scrolls until the level's end.

One last thing, I changed moving left and right, so that it isn't momentum based. I hope this fixes one of the problems about my previous build.

The build

One of the most pointless problems I had occurred when I was building this version. It was on Thursday, when we were showing our builds. When I ran my build, it showed only the player and enemy, not the tilemap, and the camera wasn't scrolling. I contacted Ian for help, and we tried everything to debug this build, including adding and removing components and objects, but it the result would still be the same. Ian finally suggested the game's Library folder, which I did. Then we realised that the problem was that it was building an earlier scene. I changed the scene to the current one, but had to sit through 20+ minutes of building because I deleted the folder. If only I had noticed it earlier...

Criticisms

After I posted my build, I received the following criticisms:

• A fellow student found that pressing against the road causes the bike to get stuck
• They and another student also noticed that the back of the level wasn't blocked off
• Another suggested a maximum speed and/or breaking
• Two wanted the camera to be adjusted so that it is ahead of the player when accelerating (and presumably behind them when decelerating)
• A student wanted the enemy to go faster, and take more than one hit

Concerning the back of the level, I guess I forgot to block it off; I did it with the end of the level. As for the camera, I experimented with the Lookahead and Dead Zone parameters, but I didn't implement it. I think I forgot about it as well. Finally, regarding the maximum speed, I'm not sure how to implement it. I thought about tracking the player's velocity, but I didn't know how to do that. I reckon I could implement the other suggestions.

Conclusion

Last devlog, I noted that I was having problem with the enemy's raycasts ending in the same place. Hopefully (with some help with Ian), I'll implement the enemy's tracking and shooting mechanics by the end of the week. For now, however, it's time to ride off to the sunset. Or that's what I would be doing if I had a horse. Which I don't. 

And don't bother sending me one. I don't think they're cheap to take care of.