Journal Entry 2

Date: 4.4.2023

Activity: Project B - finished implementation of the one-page level design

Notes: I've finished the implementation of my one-page level design. Except for the minor change of the view range of the big boss in the previous version, I don't think I changed anything else. Everything else was just as I drew it on the one-page level design. It took me a lot of time but to be honest, a lot of the time was spent figuring out how the lighting works and adding decorations. The implementation of the trampoline was fairly easy, the most annoying part was figuring out where everything is in the scripts. Even easier was adding hidden rooms - I didn't even need a script to do that. But there were a couple of things I didn't really think about when making the level design. For example, you need to pick up a key to unlock the boss arena but when would the door open? Once you pick up the key? But how would a player know what door had opened if they picked up the key first before even seeing a door? I wasn't sure how animations worked but I was sure how scripts worked. That's why I decided that the door would open once the player is at the door and has a key with them (if not, a dialogue window will pop up indicating that they need a key to proceed) and to do that I needed to write a bit of code to do that which wasn't hard either. One thing I don't really like about my level is that the enemies don't act as you'd expect them to. It's most apparent with the big boss. Killing it is too easy - all you need to do is shoot it. Which doesn't sound bad but the problem is that if you stop shooting, the enemy won't attack again. Ever. It's like it forgot how to attack and I'm not sure why. I decided not to try fixing it since it's an asset from 2D Gamekit and I feel like fixing it would require more than just editing a couple of lines of code. I'm quite happy with the rest though. I also added a bit of camera work (camera bounds, to be precise), played with the dialogues and added a window once the player finishes the level. Overall, it was fun and I enjoyed creating the level. 

Invested hours: 7

Outcome: I've successfully finished creating the level from my one-page design. I only added one minor change to it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.