Testing Updates/Future Possibilities 

Advancements from testing

In the previous devlog I explained that many bugs brought to my attention by peer testing were resolved but I did not add any level complexity and the scientist’s pathing had not been resolved. So for this week's game development these areas were addressed.

For complexity a timer was added to every level to add replayability as players can then try to beat their scores. The highest score of each level is stored within player preferences so that if a player is able to complete the level faster than any other player the score at the end will be highlighted by saying “HIGHSCORE” instead of just “Score”. This was implemented by modifying the finish level code so that it checks if the players score is better than the current high score within player preferences, if it is then the current score will replace the high score within player preferences. If not, nothing will change.

The scientist pathing issue  has finally been resolved on level 3. Thanks to my tutor Lake Hopkins it was determined that due to issues with rounding when calculating floats the scientists were not detecting if they made it to the mid check properly, so by changing it so that it detects the approximate position using Mathf.Approximately() (Technologies, 2024). After this change within the code the scientist animation is now functioning as desired.

Another big addition this week was adding sound effects as suggested briefly while someone was playing my game. The added effects were for the portal gun, player death, level completion and the lazer’s button. All sounds for this game were found through freesound.org. These sounds were easy to implement by connecting them to a desired game object and having them triggered when needed within scripts that are attached to the same object (Toledo, 2023). But the death sound kept getting cut off by the level resetting, to fix this a Coroutine was implemented to postpone the level reset for 0.2 seconds so the full audio can play (Technologies, 2024). All the sound effects should run in the game without bugs.

Future Possibilities

Currently this game is in a very simple state, but all the building blocks are there. Important updates for this game's playability are more levels, more art, more obstacles, improved scoring and more elements of storytelling.

Levels within the game currently simply show off the current games mechanics within four short levels. Developing these levels would mean adding new levels that use the games obstacles to  create complex long levels that force the player to think differently in order to solve them.  

Adding more art particularly within the backgrounds would help the games' immersion and visual appeal. For the storage levels, what is currently brown walls could be replaced with shelves of boxes and equipment to further communicate the setting. For the scientist levels it's slightly more difficult as lab walls tend to be plain white, this is why there are objects within level 3 and 4 that are supposed to represent science equipment. Currently the scientist equipment is made up of simple shapes, but drawing up sprites for these objects that match the scientist animations would help add context to the scenes. 

Current issues with the scoring system is there's no way to check the high score of a level unless you’ve achieved it yourself and saw HIGHSCORE on the level end scene. This is very impractical for fostering competition as it's hard to compete with the unknown. An easy solution to this would be adding a high score page to the main menu and making sure the current high score is also displayed on the level end screen so players can find it easily. Honestly it was quite silly of me not to do that earlier.

Story telling was not implemented within this game during these 13 weeks of development as the desired cutscenes would take a lot of time to implement. But if this game were to be further developed it would be great to add cutscenes. The first cutscene would introduce the main character and their circumstances. A UFO could be shown flying around, then crash landing into earth to immediately be found by the military, the soldiers would be shown talking about the crash, highlighting clearly that they don’t know the slime is the currently unconscious alien, but instead thinks it must be the aliens bodily fluids, so they jar the alien up and move him into storage where the game starts.

References

Bird_Man (2015) Click.wav, Freesound. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Bird_man/sounds/275152/ (Accessed: 31 May 2024).

Breviceps (2018) Mud Splat, Freesound. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/Breviceps/ (Accessed: 31 May 2024).

scaevola (2016) New Lazer.WAV, Freesound. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/scaevola/sounds/333261/ (Accessed: 31 May 2024).

Technologies, U. (2024a) Mathf.approximately, Unity. Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mathf.Approximately.html (Accessed: 31 May 2024).

Technologies, U. (2024) MonoBehaviour.StartCoroutine, Unity. Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.StartCoroutine.html (Accessed: 31 May 2024).

Toledo, V.M.C. (2023) How to play sound effects in unity: A step-by-step guide, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@victormct/how-to-play-sound-effects-in-unity-a-step-by-step-guide-73e5e1d8e100#:~:text=In%20the%20Unity%20Editor%2C%20create,%2D%3E%20%E2%80%9CAudio%20Source%E2%80%9D. (Accessed: 31 May 2024). unadamlar (2019) Bell ringing II, Freesound. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/unadamlar/sounds/476176/ (Accessed: 31 May 2024).