Journal Entry 2

Date: 01.03.2023

Activity:
Imported GameKit assets.
Used those to build my first game levels following the tutorial.
Debugged for an hour.

Invested Hours:
Not including the second lab itself, about 5 hours.

Outcome:
See attached project.

Notes:
I feel like I spent way more time on this than was expected or required but it just took me that long to figure out what I wanted to do in the levels, to actually do it, and to contemplate various decisions Unity devs have made, like why do lights exist on a different plane of existence than everything else and can't be sorted in layers alongside everything else, or why does unspecified object for teleport not default to every movable object.
As for the levels themselves, I made something of 1.5 levels. I'll skip the 'what' and 'how', and instead try to think of the 'why'...
The tutorial explained teleports within a scene, and that made me think, why would I want to teleport the players in such a small space? The only reasonable explanation was to make them return to now unreachable area, because they missed something important, in this case the key.  It was fun to realize I could use the looping platform I already had, that most players would not ride all the way around, to hide this key and give the teleport a purpose. In the second level/scene I wanted to do more of a puzzle level than a mechanical challenge, so I made this. The biggest adversary is the short range camera, so you can't see the upper two platforms at all, and only the bottom light of the third, from where the pressure plates are, which makes it tough determining if they are moving or not. Once that is figured out though, thanks to the character's generous jump height and distance, getting the platforms in some position where the exit is reachable is pretty easy, so overall, the time required to solve it is not long. Oh, yeah, and I wanted the red herring on the left top side, opposite to the exit, because there was no way to really fail at this puzzle otherwise...