Devlog 5: Putting It All Together

This week's progress is all about putting all the pieces together to prepare for a testing session.

Save System

We have made significant improvements to our save system. It has been reformatted and now operates with just one component, making it more streamlined and efficient!

One of the key additions is the implementation of EventFlags. These are essentially boolean values that indicate whether a specific event has occurred in the save file. For instance, imagine if you wanted a sound effect to play when a player enters a grand room, but only on their first visit. With EventFlags, this is made possible.

User Interface

A simple main menu has finally been added! This will act as the first scene once the game is loaded up. While we initially had some troubles with buttons correctly moving to the next scene, this was quickly fixed by scaling the UI elements with screen size.

A simple main menu. Created by Athen and Shawn.

Character Modelling

The player character model has finally been completed! After adding the bones (the process of rigging), the character could now be animated in Blender via a few simple key frames. Each key frame contains a significant change in pose; the frames in between seamlessly transition to the next key frame. This makes animating quite convenient, as there's no need to worry about frame-by-frame movement.

The player's idle animation. Created by Georgie.

This model was then exported as an .FBX file to Unity 3D, which conveniently exports the model, its armature, materials, and animations in a streamlined manner.

The implemented player model. Created by Georgie, Athen, and Shawn.

Minor Bugs & Fixes

Camera: for the last few weeks, we've noticed that the drone's camera view had been displaying some kind of instability; the view was jittery and laggy, impacting the smoothness of the gameplay and the overall player experience. The technical team held a debugging session to identify the root cause of the issue, which involved toggling various settings on and off, and conducting certain tests to isolate the problem. The technical team surmised that this was a physics inconsistency; this was fixed by using FixedUpdate instead of simply Update in the code. No more jitters!

Drone SFX: we also have a bug where the moving drone noise compresses to an uncomfortable degree.

Lighting: we had an issue where the drone's light source was not displaying correctly on certain tiles from ProBuilder; instead, they were simply displaying a shadow. The technical team discovered that by default, Unity only displays four lights on a mesh, so we bumped this number up to the maximum of eight lights. Boom! No more lighting bugs.

Testing

Testing was also completed this week - see the devlog here!

Thank you! :]