Development Log #4

Welcome to Devlog 4!

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Week 5

Hello Everyone! Welcome to the fifth Devlog. For this week we had a lot of planning to do because it was another LEVEL JAM! To be honest.. I love Level Jams! To sit down and brainstorm with Michael is amazing. I feel like we accomplish more together than we do alone (In my personal opinion). For this week's theme we got "Text Based Adventure"!

THEME – Text Based Adventure

IDEA

I want to begin this week's Devlog by stating what exactly is a "Text Based Adventure". When you play a game that only uses text to define what a story is, what it contains and how it ends is a "Text Based Adventure". There are many ways to accomplish this and one of the most well known games for this is Zork. The route that Michael and I decided to take was actually playing as a character that gets absorbed into an old terminal style computer. The computer notices you as a malware and decides to run a process that will eventually end up deleting you! You have to use the "override" arrow sequence in order to stop the computer from deleting you. To figure out what the arrow sequence is you must complete different tasks that the computer gives you. After completing each task an arrow will appear indicating what direction the arrow is in what order. That was the main concept, now to what the actual game was composed of!

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Player and Terminal System

The first thing that we had to make was the actual text based terminal and the main character! Michael began with the terminal and found out how to make the text appear as if it was being typed slowly or quickly across the screen. This was exactly what we wanted! We put it together with a border and old terminal background color and BAM, now we have an older looking terminal with readable text coming across the screen.

After getting the main terminal working, we decided on getting a character made from text that could move around the entire screen. Just to point out I am not a great artist but from looking at the character I feel like I did a great job and especially with the animations! Actually, to dive into the animating of the character a bit I want to just give credit to people who do this for a living! You guys rock! I spent hours just in one night whipping up the animations for the main character and boy was I mentally exhausted afterwards! To change the animations in unity was also something that we had to experiment with as well which made it even more exhausting. For the character we didn't want to just use Photoshop or any other software for the design but to actually manipulate a text field that the character was set to. Here is the file for the animations if you would like to check it out. (we had to copy every line for the animations to work properly including the spaces!)

Player Animations.txt

Download TXT • 1KB

ANIMATION FOR MOVING

Timer and Arrow Sequence

The main concept for the game as mentioned earlier was to have a deletion timer and a way to stop it (Arrow Sequence). The timer was the easier of the two parts where we just set a text object to whatever the timer was set to. Then the difficult part was up next! We had to figure out how to display two types of arrows (Hint Arrows and Player Input Arrows). This was very tricky because everything is rendered in as a GUI object and not sprites which can cause scaling issues for different screen sizes. Another thing that made it difficult was due to the fact that the Hint Arrows are preset and all rendered before, if a player's screen size was to change the arrows didn't scale correctly compared to the arrows that were set after the player presses a specific arrow key. After spending countless hours fixing those scaling issues we made the first hint section and actual input for the arrows to render in.

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Not to spoil all the main levels for what we did I will just share some screen shots of what they look like. I will however go into some of the major issues we found in such levels. The order of the screen shots are how they will appear in the game but that is susceptible for change due to play testing!

FILE MANAGER

CAPTCHA

FIREWALL

GRAVITY FLIPPER

PLATFORMER

SPACE INVASION

TEXT QUEST

PROBLEMS

Although there are many minor errors that need to be fixed the game is at a playable state and the biggest bug fixing that we have to work on is due to the UI scaling. In one of the sections we have to come up with a formula to make a jump force fit for all screens. So.. to top it all off any issues that are encountered throughout any section is likely due to some scaling formula that we haven't quite figured out yet. In this Devlog we only managed to finish up six of the seven levels and will showcase the seventh level in the next log. This is because the entirety of the last section was more challenging and we wanted to have a fresh mindset when tackling each task for the last section (Text Quest).

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ENDING

That is all we had for this week, due to the length of the game next week's Devlog will expand on what we had left for this Level Jam. I hope to see you guys next time! All photos from this Devlog post will be updated in the gallery so be sure to check it out and have a good day!