Devlog 2 - Brett Davis (here we go again)

Hello, its been a while since my last devlog and quite a few changes. Though they aren't the main focus of our first playtest, I've been working on our system and combative mechanisms and in this log I be doing a brief overview of each one. 

February 3rd - 7th

Reorganized Scene

As the project has been going on, member have had difficulty finding certain important systems in our code, so I reorganized files and layered out some general rules for putting things into the code:

• Assets | all art, Animations, sounds and narrative Data
• Prefabs | Materials, Prefabs
• Imports | all imported packages put into Unity
• Scenes | scenes
• Scripts | All Scripts and Scriptable Objects

This was a mistake, as horrible things to my git would occur... Later though.

Updated Player (health, UI, Reset & Death)

Health in the game is to work in 2 ways:

- Blood meter: a shield like health the regain by hitting enemies

- Health: a perminate health that you lose when you are hit without blood

In this temp model, the long bar is your health, which you lose 1/4 of each time you're hit without blood (you have 4 hits before you DIE). This works though a "Blood Manger" essentially, whenever the enemies hits the player and event is called, and reduces the blood meter by the enemy damage and if out, damages 1 bar on the players health. When the game resets a method is called the resets both too full.

Reset

This thing makes me want to scream. The restart button sadly doesn't fully reset the player, but restores stats and player position, and the current moment, enemies don't entirely reset... So it still needs a rehal for later on. But why was this problematic in the first place? Prefab, since players a prefab, that doesn't exist at the start of the game and it needs to reference a non prefab at the start of the game. Unless the pause menu was active well the start menu was active going into the game, it would brake. So the solution was the find pause in an awake fuction and turn it off AFTER the player starts the game. This is honestly a temporary solution for a headach later.

Death

The YOU DIED screen was luckily really easy since I already implemented the Restart Mechanism. All it does is appear when the player death event occurs. 

Level transitions:

This is pretty much followed 1 to 1 with How to make AWESOME Scene Transitions in Unity! - YouTube. Essentially, it allows for you to move between scenes and places a cross fade whenever entering a new scene. Its fairly useful and customizable, as it uses build settings to change scenes.

Wall Obstructions

We wanted a system similar to hades, where going behind a pillar, will make it "fade out" and disappear. How it work it work is by taking the players position and sending a raycast to check if there is any object with the layer "wall" on it, if so, it applys this funny line of code UnityEngine.Rendering.ShadowCastingMode.ShadowsOnly, onto the mesh, applying only the shadow of the mesh. As well vise versa to restore it.

 Breakable objects

Again inspire by hades with breakable pots and such, a little extra interaction for the player to have. Player brake this objects by attacking them or dashing through them. If the thing hit that object is tagged player, the object will be destroyed.

February 8th - 11th

note: some off these systems were updated multiple time through out the week, however I will be going with the latest of that systems code of that week

FULLY ENEMY REHAL

Updated enemies

Enemies were added way back in the POC, at the most basic level. All they could do I walk towards you and provided little to no difficulty in gameplay.

With this new update enemies will slowly backup into a quick lunge at the player position (when they started backing) to create a semblance of an attack, each color is a separate signifier of the attack phase;

- Red: normal and walks towards you

- Yellow: Backing up and about to dash

- Purple: Dashing

All of this is done canvas shown below 

Updated enemy spawning

In the original POC enemy spawns work incredibly easily, Enemies would be places at spawn point, and each "wave" simply spawned more enemies. 

This however has been rehauled so that we have a difficulty currency (I forgot that name of this kind of system I'm so sorry). The basics of this system: is too assign each enemy a difficulty, to spawn an enemy randomly in a designated area (the spawnLayer) and have waves of random enemies accourding to there difficulty value (if a wave difficulty is 10, you can have ten1 difficulty enemies or five 2 difficulty enemies).

I as well did a series of bug fix's:

- player controls remap between UI and Game

- UI scales properly

- rescaled the player to a 1 scale for the upcoming 3D model

- added in a "needed for level" file that contains everything needed for the game too work'

- added a capsule cast to movement so player cast dash through walls (hopefully)

February 13th - 19th

Git made me very sad :(

So... remember when I said fixing the files may have caused an issue, well I'm not sure if it 100% was but, some new files were added to the game and for a good few days I was unable to pull from the git due to some sort of missing origin file (might have been anti virus honestly). I had to reclone the entire project WHICH STILL DIDN'T WORK, so I redownloaded git and though I'm still not sure how it got working, the command prop suddenly worked and I was able to retore my git.

Elevator

This week I was asked to make an opening "animation" for the elevator (the way you exit the level), so I did!

The elevator open works with the enemy wave system, when you finish a enemy wave an event called OnFinalWaveCompleted is activated, panning the camera too the door (simular to BOTW chests) and activating a script the opens both doors +light. 

This really well because this can be used on a trigger, if there are no enemies and the trigger is activated it will automatically complete the wave and do the above.

Enemy Spawning in

This is something I wanted to do for awhile, Hades has a system were when enemies are spawning in, it will show you the place they're spawning before the spawn: I added a spawn time for enemies to spawn in, our logo as a summoning circle along with a very basic particle system.

As before, I did some general bug fixes:

- Replacing elevators with the new ones

- placed in some clucky animations (thank you riki for fixing it)

- added the layer properly to the levels

- and reupdated how player calls to the pause menu

Overall the past mouth has been great, I've learn a TON of different techniques for UI, collision, etc and so far its been pretty fun to work on our game. In prep for the next playtest, I hope to split up the player manager (its 500+ lines help please), at start rehauling the powerup system.

Thank you for reading, this is a bit late so I don't expect too get much feedback, but if you have some I am MORE then happy to listen!