Yeah, sorry about that, day 2 and 3 were hectic so I didn’t get around to doing a log.
Game is available here:
ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55751
A lot of graphical improvement and gameplay tweaking was done, the biggest issue I had, and still have to be honest, was the enemies seeing the player, sometimes it worked as expected, other times it seemed like the ai waited for ages until they picked up on the player’s location, if they did at all.
Theme: You Are The Monster
Not a fan of this theme, far too close to You Are The Villain.
It’s taken about 4 hours to decide on a direction, I’m going to go for the player being the bad guy out from a horror movie, sneaking around the map taking out the sweet innocent ai.
So far struggling with vision cones, decided to go with a box collider, it’s not perfect but for the moment it will do.
Right, switched from a collision box to an actual camera to represent the ai’s line of sight and it works.
Okay, it sort of worked, the problem was it wans’t taking into account walls and stuff.
After about four hairs of hair pulling I’ve got it working using OnWillRenderObject and a raycast check if the player is the first collider hit, now it DOES work, which is nice.
15fps on fastest settings…hm.
Okay, turns out having a camera for every enemy is a really bad idea, switched it out for a cone modelled in Blender (mad art skills yo!) and a trigger.
This is it, the home stretch!
Splash screen, instructions, text cues, end screen, credit screen are all in place.
I’ve tweaked things about as much as I can think to tweak them, now I need to pretty things up a bit and add sound, then I shall be done!
Turns out the way I was doing on screen text was tanking my FPS, switched it up to actual GUIText objects and boom, great FPS.
I’ve added objects to make things look nicer, some sound is in, going to look for some more and then that’s me done and ready to submit 😀
Aaaaaand I’m done.
Desktop:Â http://wasdmagician.itch.io/reincarnage-desktop
Web:Â http://wasdmagician.itch.io/reincarnage-web
It’s been quite stressful, a lot of fun and very informative 😀
Takeaways:
I’m ditching the level idea, there isn’t enough time, I’m probably going to go with a semi-survival based system.
I’ve replaced the bullets with enemy heads, also added health packs and damage modifiers 😀
Switched things about a bit, gave the game an actual purpose and amped up the difficulty a bit.
I’ve also changed it so that you don’t have to click to fire but you can hold down the button, you’re fire rate get’s quicker the closer you get to death.
Playable link:
http://wasdmagician.itch.io/reincarnage?secret=LQnJ5wkcGawAR1Xybn6YRXSlgI
I’m trying to keep that up to date with each major change.
So, what’s left to do:
I need to add sounds, aesthetic objects, text cues (I need to figure this out), add the splash screen, probably other things that I can’t think of right now.
Added a second set of spawners for the return journey (it wasn’t hard enough ;)) and now you die if you get pushed out of the level, it’s a bug I’d rather fix but I doubt there’ll be time so it will have to do.
Unity just crashed.
I now have to remember all the changes I made in the last half an hour.
Not happy.
It appears Unity doesn’t have an auto-save… wut…
Hopefully managed to recover from the crash, I’m *pretty* sure everything I’d done has been done again, don’t think I’ve forgotten anything.
Got the splash screen in, appears to be a bit blurry, at least on the web version.
Blaaaaah, no sleep, this is essentially Day 4 part 2.
Trying to implement some animations and it’s not going so well, I can do one, I just can’t figure out how to make it change to another one depending on what’s happening.
Next time I need a team.
Single animations will have to do, there isn’t much time left, I’m not even certain of my ability to finish this within the time limit 
Also, can we ignore the fact that my player appears to be firing his yellow bullets out of his… well.
I’ve now got triggers in place to set off the enemy spawners so they only start spawning when you enter an area.
I think the next step will be reloading your weapon using enemy corpses >8D
Just realised there is something wrong with my mouse facing rotation, that is odd.
Well, it’s actually the next day and that mouse facing rotation problem went from a minor inconvenience to a massive problem, turns out my game is essentially unplayable in the build versions because the rotation code doesn’t work, it only works properly in editor window.
Spent a good chunk of hours and some very patient help on reddit trying to sort it out with no luck.
For the moment I’m going to carry on with development in the small editor window and come back to it later.
15Â hours later and 7 hours of patient help from Bauns over at the Unity3d subreddit and I’ve finally, sort of, figured out what the problem was.
When I ran the build in fullscreen the default setting of the window was lower than my native resolution, changed it to my native resolution and it works. Windowed mode also works.
Gah.
I do however have ammo pickups working a bit so that’s good.
Enemy spawning now works, currently only works with a single enemy type, will have to expand that.
Looks like if I want to use pathfinding I’m going to need to switch to 3D.
Not particularly pleased.
Right, nearly back up and running, just need to get back enemy and player damage.
Phew, it’s taken a good chunk of the day but I’m finally back where I started.
I can now use Navmesh’s so that’s nice, a bit finnicky when it comes to collision though.
VIDEO!
I quite like the way the enemies mob you if you let them surround you.
Level loading:
Had a bit of a struggle with camera control but that seems to be working now.
So at this point I have a moveable character who rotates to follow the mouse (used for aiming) and an enemy that moves in a straight line towards the player and rotates to face them at all times.
I’m really enjoying working in Unity, there are still some things that make no sense to me (why can’t I just change the transform of the camera like I can with everything else?).
Video:
Player is Red, Enemy is blue.
I may eventually change the Camera so that it only moves when the player tries to go off screen, not sure.
I’ve now got bullets and I’m using prefabs and instantiation like a fancy person!
They fire properly in the direction that the player is facing, they don’t collide with the player (any more), they are destroyed at one of two times.
I’ll need to figure out a way to change the amount of push the bullet applies to the enemy I think, so different weapons or strengths will increase or decrease the push range, it might just be speed, I’m not sure.
Video!
I’ve now got the health/damage ratio and enemy death in place, it all needs tweaking quite heavily but the basic idea is in place.
Also, on-screen variables, yay!
This is possibly the most productive I have ever been in a gamejam.
Starting on the Week Of Awesome game jam over at Gamedev.net.
Theme is: Death is useful.
So far the only decisions I have made are that I will be creating a 2D top-down shooter in Unity.
Theme wise I intend to have the player’s damage increase the closer they get to death and possibly a weapon that makes use of the corpses of the enemies you have killed, I figure I can build on to that to improve further.
I haven’t used Unity before but I think it comes up in the coming Uni year and it’s something I should really get a grip on.
It’s a little more confusing to begin with when I compare it to UE4 but the coding side of things is orders of magnitude better, it actually has usable documentation and examples for a start.
Take note Epic!
Sorry I disappeared for the last 4 days, I was finishing up this game and taking part in the BaconGameJam as well, so things got a bit hectic.
Everything is done, and uploaded.
It’s been fun 🙂
My game is available here: http://wasdmagician.itch.io/reddit-mixtape3-searcher
Game Dev Blog 