This week was the final rush to finish the game. I implemented a teleport system to connect each of the three levels. I spent a few hours implementing a pause menu and moving the debug control options to this pause menu. I made also improved the look of the ‘BUSTED’ sign when the player is caught by the guard by making it world space and therefore emit light. I added a tutorial section for the grapple introduction which tilts the camera up at the grapple point. The camera was also given a reset functionality when the right stick on the controller was clicked. I spent a few hours polishing my scene and fixing bugs.
With the final vertical slice build now complete, I can say with certainty that I am proud of what this team has accomplished and I am very happy with what I contributed to it. There are a few aspects that I think went particularly well for me during this project. First, is level design. When Wellington Armageddon was approaching we essentially had nothing due to over scoping our level. I worked with Conrad and we quickly put together a level design and I created it in-engine. It was far from perfect but it was just what we needed to get the game in the hands of play testers in Wellington. The feedback from those playtesters and the ones from MDS in the same week proved invaluable to the development of our game mechanics. After Armageddon and the deadline for Vertical Slice drew closer, the team found itself in a similar state as we did not wish to use the Armageddon level for submission as it was more of a gauntlet which threw all of its mechanics at the player at once. Zac and I picked up our whiteboard markers and designed another level which introduced mechanics slower and had more context to its design. We quickly had a solid design which we did not deviate much from during development. The level was split into three scenes so each programmer could work on one. We each put a lot of time into our scenes and I am very happy with how they turned out (mine is the middle scene). Because we didn’t have much time, we used ProBuilder to create the level which proved to be very efficient. The AI turned out alright. They have some expressive animations and provide at least a basic level of challenge and engaging gameplay. I think one I the things I would like to focus on after Vertical Slice is providing more ways for the player to mess with the guards because that’s always fun. Right now they don’t really do a whole lot. There were a couple features that I made which I was also super happy with purely because they looked so pretty (or at least I thought they did). I especially love how the main menu turned out as the endless running of the characters encapsulates the game’s themes nicely. It’s also nice because it’s only about a dozen objects that keep getting pushed back and forth. The 3D text for the title turned out well because it was affected by the post processing and therefore emitted light. Also, when the lamp flew past the title text, it overlapped it which looked really neat. Another aspect that I think looks quite slick was the ‘BUSTED’ text and cell bars which slide in when the player is caught by a guard. Finally, I was quite happy with how the grapple cable turned out. It’s still a bit janky, but it’s a big improvement over what it was. The team and I also made a lot of mistakes and learnt a lot through the process. The biggest mistakes came from project management and my own stubbornness. There were certain aspects of the game that were over-scoped or cut due to the game’s mechanics changing resulting in a lot of hours that can’t be seen in the final product. One big one was using physics to control the player’s grapple arm and have it stretch towards the grapple. Dylan spent a lot of time trying to get this to work and we discussed that we should opt for a simpler implementation. Unfortunately, my stubbornness did not let me give up just then and instead I wasted a few more hours. After trying for a couple days to get it working, I conceded that it was time to give up on the physics. A similar thing happened with the character controller. Early on we had people playtesting the game and we received feedback that the movement did not feel nice. Zac suggested we use a plugin which was designed to create fun movement in platformer games. That sounded good but somehow to me, it seemed like using the plugin was accepting defeat for being bad at programming. So, I wasted another evening attempting to rewrite the movement which of course amounted to nothing and we used the plugin. I learnt two things here. 1) It’s easy to make movement in a game but it’s difficult to make movement which feels good and 2) there is nothing wrong with using a plugin which will save you time. The game’s scope and mechanics also changed significantly over time. We intended to have a larger level and built a significant amount of it. There was a light narrative weaved into the design of this level so I developed a lightweight dialogue system to convey narrative context to the player. However, this level was unfortunately scrapped because it was over-scoped and there was simply not enough time to complete it and make all the space interesting. The final Vertical Slice level had almost no narrative context and so my dialogue system was no longer necessary. It may come in handy later, we shall see. The continuous evolution of the game’s mechanics and levels was an interesting learning experience which also, unfortunately, involved a lot of hours which did not amount to anything. However, with the strong mechanical foundation we have created I expect production going forward to be smoother and more efficient.
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