#itgd devlog

This is it y’all! The last Intro to Game Development Devlog with my final group project DONE  (and available to play HERE!) There’s no web build right now because unity wont let me build a web build for some reason :((((

Our game is called Brick by Brick, inspired by Mother Mother’s song Bit by Bit! As some of you saw in the previous devlogs, you’re trying to survive in the forest and also build a new home before night time comes!

You cut trees with your mouse! If you don’t move too far away from the tree though, you won’t be able to ACTUALLY chop the tree. There’s weak and strong trees so you can’t go wild on the trees. I worked on this mini game and it’s a little buggy because of the mouse detection and my mac isn’t the best when it comes to speed etc.

You also gotta stack some bricks!! You have to press random keys along with a mouse button to slam those bricks down!! I didn’t work on this one, but I can def tell ya the lerping my teammate used is vvvvv nice touch!

The last minigame is to collect apples and avoid pine cones that stun you! I added a cute lil’ particle effect for when you get an apple and one of our artists made an animation for when you don’t catch the apple ( which is pretty juicy looking if you ask me!) The main stuff we did this final week was put everything together! Like we needed to: - Put in art & sound assets - Sprinkle in some ‘juice’ - Make the apple game a lil harder - Make sure the game has an end state and it can be replayed

So all three minigames that we wanted as the bare minimum are done (for the most part) but they just need tweaking and art assets in/functioning fine!

(The trees here get moved a lot when cut so I’ll need to fix that >o> ) Besides fixing/adding in art, I want to add screen shake and what other little “juice-y” things that’ll make these minigames feel even better to play!

The minigames don’t switch yet when the time runs out so that’s what I’m gonna work on tomorrow along with some sound assets!! I’m not sure if I should go 8bit or more acoustic-y to fit the game since we’re doing pixel art but like...using that Mother Mother song as inspiration. Maybe I’ll do an 8bit cover and like add more to it ( or a bit of a mashup >:D ) Actually, I’m definitely going to do an 8bit mashup, but who knows what it’ll be. Moving on to the other minigames!

The catching fruit game is simple and complete! The more apples you catch, the quicker they fall down until your combo causes a teeny little bonus time (where a bajillion apples fall!) It was initially a bug because of what the combo system did to the spawning time, but we decided to keep it with some minor edits of course! And the last game we have together is a stacking bricks game

It’s pretty dang simple as you can see. Press the right buttons to slather bricks  and also *slam* down those bricks!

Another thing that needs to be done is the scoring system. It’s sort of obvious how it’s gonna work since it depends on score so that I might mess with tomorrow as well. We have about a week and a half left ‘til this is due so the stretch goals I can definitely see getting chopped. While it can be easu to program it’s a lOT to animate and like...more sound assets would need to be made so. These three minigames might be it.

This week in Intro to Game Dev..

We’re starting Final (Group) Projects!! It’s run in a game jam sort of way as in like we all have a theme to work off of but really we all have a song.  My team of 4 has to make a game inspired by the song Bit by Bit by Mother Mother 

My team and I were all thinking about building like a house/cabin and having it to do with something in the woods after listening to this song. To make the load not to heavy, we decided to go with a warioware-esque game where you’re doing minigames and depending on how well you do them it affects how well your house is built! We did some brainstorming (and a few mockups that I need to go find) for each minigame and the minimum amount to be in the final (due May 15th) would be 3 while the maximum would be 6. The mini games(which I’m excited about) are about: - Cutting wood - Stacking bricks - Catching Fruit - Befriend Wolves - Forging Swords - Fishing ;) The prototypes for cutting wood, stacking bricks, and catching fruit might actually be done by tomorrow, but we’ll see!

Currently the cutting wood minigame works but is laggy as heck!! My computer isn’t even lagging its just the editor so I’m really confused :l ( See below)

How this is working right now is that there’s this treeManager script that creates whatever number of trees you give it and adds the trees and the treeScripts into a list so that you can actually focus on the tree at the very front! Oddly enough in the gif it seems like the dimmed color the trees in the back are suppose to have isn’t changing when they become the current tree so i gotta fix that :/ Not only that, the collision detection isn’t happening enough.  There’s two types of trees. One that is cut with one swipe and another with two swipes bUT the lag is stopping that! Each tree has HP and a box collider that the mouse can collide with ( by using ~raycasting~) and yet it’s just acting funny

Ignore my typos for the debug “heyhey” and also the distance2tree stuff. We as a team planned on having the cursor be a certain distance away from the tree before it to be cuttable and I did make work sort of!! The lag broke it! Like all the trees would go at once and a bool I had was equaling true and false at the same time?? Really weird stuff bc thats not possible, so I need to really get that lag issue fixed...

This is Pebbles.

They like collecting pebbles.

This is a puzzle game, but it’s a GRID puzzle game so that it still sticks to the assignment. I was wrestling with taking the easy way out versus trying to solve an annoying issue all week and I ended up taking the easy way out :( I wanted the grid creation to be controlled via the script but because of the tile png size, it would keep getting smooshed together and even when I used an offset to fix that it still came out weird like this!!

I didn’t know it was a sprite problem until I messed with my code a bit and instantiated the pebbles in a grid. THAT worked fine! And gosh that was frustrating to realize, but I was too tired to keep at it. Building the levels in the inspector is more efficient for me right now in my constantly sleepy state. ( My classes are kicking my butt!)

But in other news, while noodling around I learned how to use Unity’s tile system a little bit (VERY LITTLE) and I started commenting my code. It’s no where near perfect and actually, one thing that always bothers me is how I just don’t know how professionals code like...am i doing it wrong? Is there a right way?

I at least got camelCase down for the most part lol

That’s all I have to say tonight. Not feeling the best emotionally right now, so I’m gonna finish fixing up some last few things and knock tf out u_u

For today’s devlog I’m going to talk briefly about what I did for my Match 3 replica ( because it’s due tomorrow and I was fortunate to finish it early!) I was absent the day the project was gone over in class and I missed out on the explanation of 2D arrays!! But it was fine because I just needed to replicate a match three game. Couldn’t be that hard right?

This is the messy little note I made for myself while trying to help my friends with their projects. Just about everyone I knew was struggling with this project >_>;;  But anyway, I wanted to write everything I needed to remember to create for this game and take notes on the example project done in class the day I was absent.

This is the game we had to replicate. It’s not really pretty, the player is that grey circle with the number and you need to swap objects with the arrow keys. You have 6 moves and every time you make a match the moves goes back up. The moves goes down one each time an arrow key is pressed.

Also the game can break because the player object is actually a tile object with a different sprite it seems :0 Either way I just don’t like it, especially the fact that you have to use the array keys for a match three game instead of a mouse.

So I re-skinned it and kind of went the easy way to make this game work. Instead of using an array of gameobjects to detect stuff I just used  ~ tiny box colliders ~ 

These box colliders check if there’s other GameObjects with the catTile script nearby and checks what type they are! If a cat has a top and bottom match they clear. The same applies to right and left matches. I also made it so that if there’s a match that’s more than 3 it’ll clear all of the matches instead of just 3/4 matches. The finishing touch I added was just the prefab of my cat everytime amatch happens

Guess who’s still sick and miserable? ://// And it’s because I haven’t actually rested! I’ve been thinking a lot about balancing everything and how I messed myself up with the narrative game project. I definitely overscoped just because I thought  “Oh! If I can make a battle system in Twine + a whole story in a week, I can totally do it in Unity using a visual novel format!”

I wanted to challenge myself because to be entirely honest, I was really bored. I don’t like being bored and more than anything I wanted to learn *something* during this narrative project - and I did learn more about TextMeshPro - but that’s it Unity wise.

I did learn that because of this AWFUL cold I was making a mess of my code and having to fix a lot of bugs. ( Like the one above) It’s not even like I was stuck and needed help with this project. I just needed more time. A hard part of being a developer and a student who lacks stability in a lotta places is finding balance. I gotta juggle papers, games, work, my own health and what not on the daily and it’s hard. Probably harder than any coding problem I’ll ever have to face. So many people tell me to take my time and that no game is worth an all nighter and of course I believe them! But its still difficult to break the old habits in my mind that’s screaming *IM NOT DOING ENOUGH* causing me to over-do things when I shouldn’t. I want to let myself get work done, but also let myself take care of myself AND let myself hang out every so often because just having some fun is a part of taking care of yourself, y’know? Balancing these three things has never been perfect for me, but one day I hope to just get to a balance that works/is healthy for me instead of something that’s *perfect* I was very lucky to get this extension and yet my game is still very broken and unfinished due to everything else that’s been going on in my life. The first part is finished at the least.

I feel like going forward there’s two things I want to start doing more. Asking for feedback about ideas to stop myself from over-scoping and commenting my code because lemme tell ya,

I can definitely handle this better. But I’m rushing and tired and burnt out and I’m just doing what works.  I need to push myself to be more organized and wise about programming instead of just doing what works so I can avoid bugs and etc.

Anyway, the next project in class is a match three game. To be honest the application we were given is kinda gross so I made my replica use the mouse instead of the keyboard and have cats. It’s not fully functional but I’m getting there.

Yup you read that right. I have a cold and DIDN’T completely finish Saturday Fright 2 like I wanted to!! 

I only finished a small portion of what I outlined in twine, but it’ll be good enough to submit for class tomorrow. When it’s completely done(on Friday hopefully) I’ll release it on itch.io and submit it to nanoreno!!

If it wasn’t for this pesky cold my hw/Nanoreno game would’ve been done on time! But alas, things happen and also I was super busy at work all week preparing for a showcase that happened yesterday. It went well and I let myself rest yesterday afterwards. So, I ended up doing all the writing today because I had no time before then. I’m super proud of all the sprites I made though!!! Like they look pretty cute.

I also had to make music for this...And I haven’t yet, because a one minute little loop shouldn’t be too hard to make. In other news I learned out to make rich text work without glitching out in an Ieunumerator! Bc I was being silly and having it type out words instead of changing the characters that are visible(thx textmeshpro lol) I also messed with the textjitter stuff thats in it’s examples, but I was too tired to incorporate it in the version for class because turning off the textjitter script doesn’t stop the text from shaking. I’m sure there’s an easy way to make it stop but I have a cold and I’m tired so I only foccused on the following. A) Making a text system that switches the character sprites correctly B)Making the battle system work correctly C)Adding some extra stuff to the battle system that’s not in the first game

So look forward to it! Later in the week...

It’s Spring break! And I’ve had a pretty emotional rollercoaster of a break that I won’t delve into. What I will say is that in order to put my health and my schoolwork first, I’m gonna delay Skate & Date’s release. I haven’t made an official announcement yet, but I will by tomorrow because I am *burnt out* yall. Anyway on to what I worked on that’s related to class. ( that I did literally all of today LMAO) I didn’t prototype the typing rpg from the first game yet into Unity but I DID sketch out all the characters that’s gonna be in the game! Really excited about this actually! ( Mainly because it’s the sequel to Saturday Fright and like, I’ve never done a sequel before and writing the first one was pretty enjoyable!)

From left to right there’s: Serafina(the protagonist), Adeline, Fiona, ~Mysterious~ new character that wasn’t in the first game, Misti, Noelani, and Harlow I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but Saturday Fright 2: Morning Routine is gonna center around Serafina going to the gym where Harlow works at. I’m going to replay all of Saturday Fright later today to plan out how all of them will act in this sequel annnd yeah.