CAGD ePortfolio

     This sprint's work went surprisingly smoothly. Since there were only two of us this time, we had to do some more tasks, but we were able to delegate them easier because there's only two ways to separate them: code stuff and make levels. My lead is much better at coding than I am, so I was in charge of making the levels. I was able to make 3 levels, a tutorial level and 2 actual gameplay levels.      There were a few things to consider when it came to making levels. First, how big the level would be. I definitely didn't want it to be small so as there's no space to move, but not too big that there's a lot of meaningless space. It seems like I've gotten the size down, since no one commented on that in the playtest. Although, I think the levels should be a bit wider so players can take a slightly less straight route to the goal. Another thing that I wanted to keep in mind when making levels is that most of the stuff in the level should be below the goal, ...

  For this sprint, I worked on creating two enemies (homing and shooting enemies) and a goal watchtower. The enemies were leftovers from the last sprint, but the homing enemy was much more developed than the shooting one. Most of the mechanics of the enemy were simple to implement, but making sure everything was attached correctly in the Unity scene was a little harder. In this sprint the player and the camera were split into different objects (they were children of an empty object before) and that resulted in my enemies either messing up when detecting the player or not being able to deal damage to the player. I made an “attacked” function that would trigger whenever an enemy or a bullet hit the player, and getting the enemies to access that was a little more annoying than it needed to be. The homing enemy was not too difficult as most of how you get it to home in on the player is just a line of code that makes the enemy look at the player and another that makes it move toward...

The sprint this time felt a lot more difficult. I definitely wanted to take a smaller amount since I was going to participate in the 24 HOURS animation jam and I needed to begin the breakout project in 280. After all, I spent most of my homework time in the first sprint actually working on the prototype. Mainly what I did this sprint was adding in Player UI and beginning to make enemies. The UI was pretty simple, but of course, enemies were a lot more difficult.  For the UI, all I did was add in score, lives and a clock that told the player how much time elapsed. These were pretty simple and it literally took about 20 minutes. For the clock I basically googled how to make it display in minutes and seconds instead of just seconds. I’m glad that was really easy as I definitely didn’t want to spend time on that. At the moment, there’s no way to actually gain score points yet since I haven’t finished working on the enemy and the lead hasn’t worked on a way to defeat them. For ene...

     For the first sprint, I tasked myself with starting up the super basics of the digital prototype: ground movement, jumping, and gliding. At kickoff, I wasn’t really sure what the level design would look like, so I decided to take care of the early programming. I did not do the grappling mechanic in this sprint because I wasn’t sure how the lead wanted it, so it was decided that he would do it in the next sprint. I also added the extra task of making the grapple target trigger, since it’s less work for the lead to program when trying to do the grappling mechanic. Luckily, since 280 went over the new Unity Input System and an easy way to do movement, I was able to get that task finished pretty quickly. Although, at first, I didn’t realize that the player character wasn’t technically always moving “forward” since the camera angle didn’t change. Thankfully, that was a simple change. Jumping was also easy as well since that was also covered in 280. For now, I left it so...

     My level was a maze, so it was a decent design. Players generally liked it, as it was a smart and easy way of doing a level design. I literally just googled “maze generator” and copied off of what I generated. Enemy placement was praised as well. One person noticed that you couldn’t jump over the walls, which I’m glad they saw. An extra thing I did was make the crystals have a different material and it was funny. People liked that. Of course, there are problems that come up with a maze, but for the most part it was pretty neat.      The main thing I can talk about here are the problems brought up. First off, since it’s a maze, people will get lost. Even though that’s kind of the point, people will get annoyed by that. I wasn’t sure how to label the areas, but one person suggested using landmarks. For some reason I thought that I should somehow paint the walls but a landmark is way easier. In a maze, there are also a lot of dead ends, which is also not ...

     Making this level in Unity was an incredibly turbulent experience. One of the crucial parts of my level design didn’t work, and I had to scramble in order to make it playable and turn it in before the deadline. I basically had to ruin everything. There are a lot of glaring mistakes in there. There’s an info zone I forgot to take out (it was for a switch that was in the previous version). The door that’s supposed to open at the end of the level doesn’t even work. Also the health crate doesn’t actually heal anything. Although surprisingly, people were able to get around the door this time as well.      Initially, my plan was to have the player climb up the stairs and then go through some doors that would take you to an area where you’d find a switch and use it to unlock the door. But weirdly enough, the transition prefabs provided in the 3D Gamekit didn’t do a thing. I was pretty sure I followed the tutorial correctly, so I’m not really sure what was up ...

     Making a late-game type level is incredibly difficult. I had my idea of making the player climb up, but I wasn’t really able to implement that. I couldn’t really think of a layout for a room that wasn’t having the player zigzag up the room. Although, according to my playtesters, what was in the level was pretty good. At least I was able to avoid the “no clear way to the exit” problem I had with my tutorial level. It was a simple “gather the keys to unlock the exit” type level, and unlike my tutorial level, there was actually a point to it.      Players generally praised the way I set up my keys, as you need two keys to unlock the exit, but there are 3 in total. You can get the first key through an easy or hard route, and then you have to get the second key by passing through some enemies. When getting the second key, I put in a weapon deleter that takes out the Nado so you have to jump through a bunch of enemies to get to the top of the room. There’s a...