Posted April 20, 2020 by Wistpotion
NOW WE ARE TALKING.
During the last cycle (that is what I have decided to call each 2 week sprint) I have been adding so much, mostly in the tutorial level, and in the cutscene that starts up before it. And now I feel like I can safely say that all the big systems, like shadows, lighting, parallax, chunks and player controller are done! So now, finally, I can begin doing what I love. Just creating shitloads of stuff, making the story deeper, juicing the shit out of the game. All that good stuff. I feel like I can work twentyfive hours a day now (if only school wouldn't keep getting in the way), just because it will be so frickin fun.
Now, what have I been doing the last cycle? A lot of stuff, so let's go into a bit more depth with some of them!
I began with looking over a system that was just awful. The chunk system I had implemented was made to save some cpu for the people with computers that were less overpowered than my monster. The system I had before was just a script that disabled the children of the gameobject. It was clunky and there was a lot of manual work in getting it working. So I did like I always do and went on a rampage all over the internet to find a better solution. I find some interesting articles and threads about combining sprites to one single texture, but it was not that useful and there was no practical way to implement it, so I went into visual studio and tried to figure out a solution on my own. And it worked! I first got all of the static sprites in the world and made them into an array. Then I made a grid for the whole world and for each tile that contained at least one sprite I added an invisible square. Whenever the player got close enough to the chunk it was turned on, and when the player got far enough away I would just disable it. It is a bit more complicated than that, but it is a good enought of an explaination. Don't really want to write twenty pages about a chunkification script. But anyways, now I had a way to divide the whole world into a bunch of chunks in the press of a button, instead of having to manually add a billion children to a game object. So that was really a good addition!
Looking at the dash, it felt really uninteresting. You just moved quicker during a short amount of time and a sound played. So I had to do something about that. I got out my trusty old particlesystem, and suddenly it got a lot more interesting. But I wanted more! So I snatched a screenshakescript from the assetstore and now it was getting somewhere. Although... the speed of the dash was looking a bit dull. So I tweaked it and I got it to look a lot more interesting than before! But when I was messing around with the number some other parts of the dash got a bit wierd, and it looks a bit too snappy right now, so I will have to do something to make it look, feel and, most importantly, work with the gameplay as well as possibly.
After I juiced the dash I looked at Mollys flight, and it looked super dull. So what did I do? I slapped a particle system and made it emitt when she was flying. Done. Some things are simple. It's nice when it is, isn't it?
Here we go, the thing I want to talk about the most. The cutscene that plays when you start the game. Truth to be told, it is not really a cutscene, more like a dialogue with some images. But calling it a cutscene is much more fancy, so I'm sticking with it. The only cutscene done currently is the first one, but it is the one that I planned to take most of the time, and the one which is the most important, because it has two jobs. 1. Make you like Molly in as little time as possible, and 2. Make shure you know who is who. So I tried to make her as lovable as possible, but also tried to give her flaws, to make her more relatable. And I only have a limited time to make you like her, because (I will spoil some things here, nothing big. Actually it is pretty big. Skip ahead if you don't want it spoiled) you and her will be separetet from each other and you will have to go through most of the game getting to her. If you have ideas of how I can do it better or just tips for how I can do it, tell me!
Until next time, stay safe during corona. Even if restictions are getting slightly less strict, you should still keep yourself safe, because the easiest way to protect others around you, and people that are old or in other ways in danger if they get the virus, is to not get the virus yourself. So wash your hands, be thankful to the doctors and people helping them out. And if you can, help someone out. Stay safe, and keep loved ones safe.