Journal Entry - Playtest Build

Date: 2022-05-10

Activity: 

• developed a playtesting prototype of the game
• built project C for playtesting

Notes:  

This was my first time making a game in Unity from scratch. I had to overcome some obstacles while doing so. Earlier practice from Project A and B helped me to get through some of them.

One of the hardest parts was implementing the platforms that the player character can jump off of. You can jump through them from below, but you must be able to collide with them when coming from above. The current solution uses a trigger collider for each platform that is wide enough to cover the entire screen. Leaving this trigger upwards turns platform collision on.  Entering the trigger from above disables collisions.

The map is procedurally generated. I created a system of "chunks" of the same height as the camera viewport. There are always three chunks present. Whenever a chunk goes out of the viewport, it is deleted, so that the memory is freed.

I used animations to create multiple states of the player character Haku. When he's eating a collectible (ham or cheese) he licks his mouth. When he barks (randomly), his sprite changes to barking.

Collectibles are implemented using ScriptableObjects, so it's easy to create more of them with different score values and sprites. The score is a combination of "climbed height" and collectibles.

There are two background entities -- birds and clouds. They are just for ambiance but were a little bit hard to implement. The hardest part was making sure the entities cannot spawn out of nowhere when the player can't see them. They generate with different scales and speeds. They always travel horizontally.

I also tried to create a background but failed twice. I tried tilemaps and tiled sprites. Neither worked well for procedural generation. I might try doing it again in the future.

Invested time:

• 40 hours over 3 weeks

Outcome:

Build (attached)