This week's sprint was a tough challenge for our team as we haven’t had to make a prototype in a short time span before. Those of us who have previously worked on our own games have been able to take our time with no set time limit. Our teacher, James, recommended we split the task for the prototype so that we all had an even workload and could complete it during the week.
Val chose to take the character movement, the entire dialogue system and of course, do the art assets
Steve took the level design of the prototype world
Mark took the Memory Match pots class, the main menu scene and the Hub World game manager
Sean chose the Memory Match UI and Memory Match instructions
I took the Memory Match game manager as well as the sound manager
In the beginning, Mark started working on the pots class before I had a chance to work on the minigame manager. Therefore, mark followed this tutorial for help,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vVdCXjXja4&t=766s&ab_channel=Mr.Kaiser. The tutorial uses sprites of the pots with a collider attached to act as the cards, and the programmer has to manually change the area in between each card. Also, the program didn't automatically turn the pots over when the match was incorrect which meant more unnecessary clicking for the user. When I went in and added more functionality, this way of doing the memory match was both confusing and not practical to change/upgrade. I talked to Mark about this and he gave the ok for me to change the way we were doing the minigame significantly. I found this new tutorial as a base, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaCjBh7bWz0&list=PLZhNP5qJ2IA2DA4bzDyxFMs8yogVQSrjW&ab_channel=AwesomeTuts. The tutorial uses buttons as the pots instead of the original sprites and colliders. This makes the ability to change the sprite image on hover and click incredibly easy and allowed me to add a highlighted blank pot to the “highlighted sprite” section of the button.
Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
I had zero expectations for how the prototype would look. I, like the rest of the group, thought that we would have basic circles and squares representing all the art assets. But Val managed to pump out a lot of pixel art, A LOT of pixel art. The images underneath are is the expectation vs reality (Expectation image created by Val).
Expectation vs. Reality
As you can see, Val made an entire 2 entire tilemaps for the ground, houses and fences. Steve used the tilemaps to create the layout of the prototype town.
Once I finished polishing the memory game (which is never truly done, it can always improve), I moved on to adding sounds to our game. I first started with a sound manager template from a past school project called BobbleHead Wars, but I soon found out that we were going to need more functionality than a simple “play this sound now” class. The original sound manager class looked like the image below in the inspector.
As you can see, the old sound manager gets fed a bunch of sound clips then you can call those sound clips from the code but have no way of controlling whether it loops or the volume of a clip.
I instead looked online and found a good sound manager that can adjust the volume and pitch of every sound individually (Link to tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OT43pvUyfY&t=617s&ab_channel=Brackeys ).
Instead of having a set of static clips and nothing else. We have a list of clips that can be adjusted individually in the editor or in code.
To read more about our game, go check out my other group members' dev blogs! Right now I only have the link to Val and Steve but next week I'll try to get the link to all 5.
Val talks more in-depth about the dialogue system: http://valeriarincon.com/?p=1854
Steve goes into the making of the town: https://steven-david215.github.io/Blog.html
If you're looking to get a hold of the prototype files, send me an email and I’d happily give you the build files so you can try it out yourself. Feel free to give all the feedback that comes to mind too! Next week our group will have a little less to talk about I believe as we are going our separate ways and resting on the weekend and family day. Our next meeting is probably going to be Monday which is when we will plan out our next sprint and I believe start working on the final boss battle prototype as we were recommended to do by our mentors at Snowden Studios. To end it I’ll leave you with some wonderful pixel art made by Val. See you next week!
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