This is going to be my last update before we need to submit our game for the Level Up showcase that is happening Tuesday, April 5, 2022. That means it is crunch week yet again for our team. While our goal isn’t to get the game 100% complete and polished, we do want to get the game to a state where a player can go from the main menu to the credits without any major bugs with all our main objectives in place. That includes the three minigames (used to recruit each ally), the final boss battle and a completed hub world the player can walk around and talk to NPCs.
I started my week working on finishing the final boss battle. That involves creating a lose condition and a win condition which we did not have yet. Since the loss condition would be a fairly simple restart of the scene, I decided to start with the win condition. My original plan was to stop the minions from spawning and remove all instances on screen, then have Isarr move to a specific location on the screen to start a dialogue box with the player. After trying this out I had some unforeseen errors, like the fact that the player could still shoot projectiles around before interacting with Isarr and I also had collider issues with moving
Isarr to the middle of the airship. Instead of staying in the same scene, I decided to transition to a new scene with static versions of both Isarr and Graey. With this method, I didn’t have to worry about moving Isarr and hiding the minions as the scene I was transitioning to didn’t need those objects in them. Instead, the new scene only has a static Graey sprite facing right and a static Isarr with dialogue appearing at the bottom of the screen.
This method was widely liked by the team. However, in motion, the transition was just too jarring to go from the fast-paced shooter immediately to a static scene. So I created a fade to black transition which you can see below. I followed a simple tutorial I found on Youtube by the amazing Brackeys for those interested in how I did that.
After completing the fade animation and adding it to every scene transition in our game, I decided I wanted to tweak the actual game part of the final boss battle. It originally was just the player running around avoiding Isarr’s projectiles and his minions while also trying to kill Isarr with various powers. When the minions died they would be disabled to be reused when needed. I wanted to add visual feedback to the player when the minions are killed when Isarr gets hit, and when Graey gets hit. For the minion deaths, I decided to play around with the built-in unity effects to try and get a cool-looking explosion effect. After about 20 minutes of fiddling with the settings (to which there are a lot), I got a good-looking explosion that wasn't too big or noisy for the screen. I coloured the particles a nice purple colour and triggered the particle to play when the minion gets hit.
Then, to tell the player they have been hit and lost health, I added a screen shake effect, I turn the player sprite a red tint and play an audio clip. As you can also see in the video below, Isarr’s sprite tints a purple colour to signify he’s been hit by the player. I am not entirely happy with this and might work on finding a better solution to that.
While I was doing all that, Steve was working on our final minigame called Fire Fighter. He was having some issues with canvas and sprite scaling so my entire team came together during the week to help him out and fix the issue. We ended up deciding to change how the background was displayed. Originally it was an image on a canvas, the new version is just a regular sprite in the game view.
As I was writing this blog I realized that the final dialogue between Graey and Isarr didn’t feel like a good place to end the game on. So I quickly whipped up a new scene at the last minute today to transition to after the dialogue is over. I wanted a celebration of all the population of the island so I hosted it in one of our three towns, Dragongulf, right by the beautiful fountain that Val created.
This with no audio or movement felt very dead. And since the art department (Val) is flooded with things to create at the moment in preparation for Tuesday, I decided not to bother her with requests for waving or dancing animations of the island NPCs. Instead, I used what little animation we already had, for instance, the fox petting animation and the minion walking animation and added those into the scene to a pretty good effect as shown below.
This feels better already, but the whole top of the screen is kind of unnerving to me so I added more unity particle effects. For this one, I decided to go with confetti and looked up a tutorial to get the most confetti-looking particles. Here is the tutorial I followed on Youtube however I did change quite a bit of the setting to fine-tune it for our situation.
The final touches I wanted to add (today at least, I’m still thinking of adding fireworks later on), is the sound of course. For that, I searched online for royalty-free celebration music and found this wonderful medieval celebration music. I also added some water fountain sound effects to go with the fountain animation.
Thank you very much for sticking me if you made it this far in the blog. I realize it is incredibly long but there is still much more my team did this week that I could not talk about. For those interested, I have posted a link to two of my group members' blog posts for this week. See you next week!
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