Date: 18.5.2023

Activity: Lot of stuff...

Notes: 

This build is  a big update from the last one. Which means that this Journal entry is going to contain a lot of information as well. 

First, I've drawn new sprites for animation of the main character (crouching, recalling spear, death and revive) as well as  sprites for a new type of enemy - a skeleton. 

In preparation for today's playtesting, we had to have a level ready of course. I've sketched an idea of how it'd look like, it should be available in the attachments. An essential part of the game is solving puzzles so I had to think of all the ways how a spear can be used. I've had more ideas but because of our limited time, I had to choose only a few. 

0) This might not even count as a puzzle, it might be one at the very beginning but then it's obvious when you encounter it - a high wall. The player has limited jump height of course so when they encounter this obstacle, they might not know what to do. To be honest, even our playtesters weren't sure what to do at the beginning but we think that it might really help if we explain the controls in a form of a tutorial for example. But back to this "puzzle": the player must throw a spear against the wall and then simply jump onto it. The tricky part is placing the spear so that the player can jump onto it as well as jump from it onto the ground above. Speaking of which, I'll discuss a problem we encountered later in this journal entry.

I've thought and implemented almost all of these puzzles myself.

1) This is also a pretty obvious one but I feel like we can safely call it an obstacle. It's in form of a button and what player must do is throw the spear against it and usually the door opens and the next area is revealed. This one is also pretty simple but gets more complicated with an addition of other puzzles, more on that in a bit.

2) Other puzzles involve pushable boxes. These are sturdy and indestructible so the player can even push them using their spear. This is essential in some puzzles but during playtesting some people got around this and managed to get to the box in an unexpected way - that's the beauty of seeing other people play your game :) Their implementation was easy - it only required BoxCollider2D and RIgidBody2D.

3) I'm pretty proud of this idea. Mirrors add a bit of spice and fun into the game in my opinion. It's fun to see the spear fly around bouncing off the mirrors and then hit a button in an satisfying way. We have two areas that involve using these mirrors and I'd love to add more but I need to be aware of our deadline. Their implementation was very tricky since rotations didn't like to behave in expected ways... Or I was just too... inexperienced let's say. Either way, it was pain in the *ss. But hey, they work and that's really nice!

4) This one is also an interesting idea - scale. The idea is that each (relevant) object has some weight and this way the scales show how much the current object standing on top of it weigh and how much it requires to have in order to open a door.  Their implementation wasn't actually that difficult. I used Physics2D.OverlapBoxAll to see what objects there are at the specific area. Then you just have to check all of the weights for every object, compare it with the required weight, choose an appropriate sprite and that's it! However, we've encountered a bug involving them - if you jump on and off of the really quickly, sometimes the door stays open. That's not the intention, so we'll try to fix that.

Finally, some areas have enemies so the player must avoid or kill them. Sometimes killing them is the only option as there's no way to advance without killing all of them.

I've also put the whole level together in Unity but that was probably the easiest part. 

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On another topic: it was my job to do the title screen and I feel like it really worked out! I took some inspiration with the composition of the spear but overall it was hand-drawn by me. The only thing I didn't make was the font. I'll link the source somewhere when we completely finish the game. There was a small problem involving the font however. Unity likes to make certain things look more... "pretty". So the pixelated font looked more like a blurry mess. Thanks to the kind souls out there on the internet I found out that I had to write a small script and attach it to the necessary texts. It's kind of stupid that there's no option for that, if you ask me. It's the same with sprites - importing new sprites in a pixelated art style requires the programmer to change the necessary setting every. single. time. It's a bit annoying is what I'm trying to say.  Anyway, the title screen also has options for settings and credits but as of right now, we don't have either of those so they don't do anything, sorry for the confusion. 

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Playtesting was really interesting and useful for us. It uncovered a bug or two and showed be that I had to redo the level a bit. You see, I made the obstacles from 0) in a way that would require the player to throw the spear in a very specific position. Because I've played the game over and over again in order to check if the level works etc, I've managed to learn the right technique but many playtesters struggled to overcome the obstacles. I'm definitely making the walls more climbable but there are one or two that must stay that way - otherwise it'd break the puzzle. But hopefully it won't be as annoying as before.

ToDo list:

- Add pause menu

- Fix all bugs

- Make a finish

- Add sounds and music

- Camera boundaries

Outcome: 

Our game is coming to an end. There are so many ideas we've thought of but couldn't implement them in the end. I might share some of them in the final Journal Entry. But overall, I'm happy with how it turned out in the end. 

Invested hours: 22