Journal Entry 7

Date: 18-20.5.2024

Activity: 

- Rewrote player movement

- Added sounds and music

- Animated player character

- Fixed end-of-level bugs

- Added controls tutorial

- Added pause overlay

- Changed colors to more pleasant ones

- Added automatic color switching mechanic

- Added moving platforms

- Created level 4 and 5 (and updated others)

- Fixed some other bugs

Notes:

I started my work by looking at the feedback I received on our playtesting practicals. There was one thing all playtesters agreed on, and it was that the player movement was horrible. Last time I gave up with it half working, but I had new energy to rewrite the movement part of the game. First I changed player to have a circle collider (I had used box and it caused a lot of bugs) which required changing ground detection. This I completed more quickly than last time but it still took a while (I needed to realize to use radius and not bounds). Then I changed how speed is added to the player to make it graduar so small presses only move a bit. After messing with rigidbody for a while, I got it into a state where it worked fine enough (and fixed the wall sticking bug). Only way later I realized I was missing deltaTime - adding it and adjusting all values fixed practically everything I aimed to fix.

One related complaint was that the player was "stuttering". I had no idea why as I was using rigidbody, so it should be fine. Luckily, I found an answer online where it was solved by setting lower Fixed Timestep in Project Settings. This also fixed it for me.

Next, I added sound effect for changing color and background music. This was fairly straightforward, just editing some audio files. I also added a face to the player and animated his eyes to make him look livelier:

Another smaller addition that playtesters requested was a controls tutorial. I added this as a small graphic on level select:

Next, I investigated a few bugs found in playtesting with end of level. I fixed end of flag animation and collider - made it to be a trigger. I got stuck here for a while as I needed to add 2D to trigger detection. A bug was also found in the end overlay, as it displayed under other overlays. I fixed this by setting priority in layer and moved over to creating a pause overlay (another requested feature from playtesting):

When creating a build, I found out I set scaling options badly, so this was revisited a few times (why doesn't Unity set scaling to FullHD by default??).

Another complaint from playtesting was that the colors were too much of an eyesore. I spent a bit of time searching websites that gave me color palettes that matched, but afterwards I adjusted them to be more vibrant. Still, they should look much better than before. If I did this project over from the start, I would have implemented a better way to adjust these colors, as I had to do a lot of manual work now.

My final area of focus was adding two new levels. For them I wanted to add two new mechanics. Level 4 automatically changes color for you - this required a bit of separating some parts of code into functions but otherwise went well. I was getting an error that sound has not been initialized yet if I tried to change immediately after load - so for now I just put a small delay before first swap. The second mechanic were moving platforms. I haven't looked how it was done in GameDev Kit that they had such nice visuals for setting waypoints. I attempted my own implementation using array of Vector3 and displaying the positions using Gizmos:

So lastly, I created the levels and built the game, fixing some bugs in the process.

And finally, I created the trailer for my game.

Invested hours: 

Rewriting player movement: 3 hours

Adding sounds and music: 30 minutes

Animating player character: 30 minutes

Fixing end-of-level bugs: 2 hours

Adding controls tutorial: 30 minutes

Adding pause overlay: 1.5 hours

Changing colors to more pleasant ones: 1.5 hours

Adding automatic color switching mechanic: 30 minutes

Adding moving platforms: 1.5 hours

Creating level 4 and 5 (and adjusting others): 3 hours

Fixing some other bugs: 1 hour

Writing this dev log: 1 hour

Trailer creation: 2 hours

Outcome:

Updated the Gitlab page for the game with my current (final?) progress and uploaded a build to itch.io (+ sent a trailer).