The Level Up showcase is officially over. We manage to pull together as a team and submit a fully working build to them. It was a tough week to get there, however. Our team worked hours on end to finish the Fire Fighter minigame, add roadblocks to the player and create a playable experience from start to finish.
For my contribution to that, I worked on adding sound effects to the Fire Fighter scene once Steve and Mark laid the groundwork for the game. It was surprisingly a challenge to find the right music for the minigame in a short time span since it needed to fit the style of the minigame and not be too out of place in the game as a whole. I ended up going for an upbeat, action-synth type song as I felt it added intensity to the gameplay that wasn’t present when it was just a void (sound-wise).
Next, since I dabbled in particle effects last week while I was making the celebration scene, Steve asked if I could show him how to make a water splash particle effect for the Fire Fighter scene when the player clicks the fire. So I shared my screen over our discord chat and I walked him through how I made my confetti particles and how to make pretty much any particles he could think of. It wasn’t a smooth process by any means however as we were having layering issues with the particle effect since most of the game is happening on a canvas. We figured out we needed to also put the particle effect on the canvas for it to be scaled correctly and in front of the other sprites. After some colour input by Val, the head of the art department, we were off to the races and created the effect whenever the player clicks a fire.
After working on the water particle effect for Fire Fighter, I suddenly got the urge to create the firework particles I mentioned I wanted to create in my blog last week for the celebration scene. For that, I found a wonderful tutorial on Youtube that I followed to make an amazing-looking effect. Around this time, Val finished making a scene for the credits which I was originally going to transition to after the celebration scene was over. Instead, I had the idea to combine the scenes and add the credit scrolling to the celebration scene which I am incredibly proud of.
The most time-consuming part of the week has been the playtests and slight adjustments to the Final Boss Battle. Since I have taken/been given full ownership of the final minigame I took it upon myself to playtest it dozens of times and adjust the settings of spawn rates, damages, and projectile speeds. It is nowhere near perfect unfortunately but time ran out and there are only so many hours in a day to work on it. I still don’t think the gameplay feels fantastic yet, but I didn’t have any time to make drastic changes so I did what I could to make it fun and engaging.
Moving to the morning of the build submission, the team was incredibly stressed and tense. Val added an intro scene where the player can talk to a couple of NPCs and then exit into the hub world. In Unity, the dialogue worked perfectly but once we made a build of the game, the dialogue would pop up as a blank window at first, then the player would be stuck in an infinite dialogue loop. An infinite loop is not a great start to a game. At this point, there was only an hour left before our build needed to be on itch.io, suffice to say, we were freaking out a lot. Mark got in touch with James Dupuis, our teacher, for aid. After close to 50 minutes of trying to debug the code, James figured out the error was with the build execution order. In the code, the Dialogue Manager calls the Conversation script to populate the canvas with the conversation. In the editor, this worked great, but once a build was compiled, the Dialogue Manager runs before the Conversation script so the manager wasn’t being populated until the next line. This made it so the dialogue and the conversation is not synced up which created an infinite loop since the conversation never actually ended. James showed Steve how to change the execution order in Unity to make the Dialogue Manager run after the Conversation script which fixed our issue 5 minutes before the deadline.
We compiled the build and sent it on itch.io at 11:58 am, 2 minutes before it was due. I’m proud of my team and the work they put in to make this game what it is. Now, for the next 3 weeks, we polish, work on the mobile build and potentially add some mechanics.
For those interested in our game: https://graeygames.itch.io/graeys-crusade
And the other hard-working teams who submitted to the Level Up Showcase: https://xpgamesummit.com/levelupshowcase/
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