Seams - Week 5

Hello once again and welcome to the 5th blog post chronicling the development of Project PsychWard. This post isn't as late as the last one, albeit still slightly behind schedule but I do have a fair bit of progress to show this week compared to last week and I'm very excited about it.

Progress throughout the team

Once again, there weren't very many significant team changes or discussion this week as we're mostly just trying to get on with things. Though there was a good amount of progress done throughout the other team members.

Music for the game has been trickling in for a while now. We've currently got the full level 1 daytime theme with 3 different layers of distortion to represent different levels of sanity, the level 1 night time theme (or at least an early version of it), an early version of the title screen theme, and I believe some other miscellaneous sound effects have also been created.

Our writer made a large flowchart that covers every possible event and interaction that the player could have in level 1, which supplies me with a good amount of information on what sorts of events I need to program in the future.

(A small snippet of the above mentioned flowchart)

Various pieces of art has been completed recently. Including animations for the player character and some of the other characters that appear on the first level. Tilemaps for level 1 during the day and character portraits that are to be rendered on the dialogue box. It's all really good though I don't want to spoil too much by showing it all here (and besides, I recorded some gameplay for a later part of this week's blog that does have some of the sprites in it anyway).

Room designs for level 1 were also finished and sent my way so that I could put all the different triggers and such into them which is one of the main things that I had been working on this week.

This week's assignment

This week's assignment was to put together level 1, in which the level needed to be complete in its design and have its quests playable. I was much more successful with the former of those two for a few reasons but putting the level together wasn't the only thing I had done this week.

The first thing I had done was prepare for adding the quests by creating their objects while I waited for final touches to the level designs. I had already made a class for quests a short while ago so what I needed to do next was make the objects themselves.

(One of the quests)

I also created two new MonoBehaviour scripts, Player, and QuestManager. The Player script will be what contains stats, and what quests the player currently holds and has completed as opposed to the PlayerMovement script that simply handles movement and collisions. The QuestManager script will be used to add quests to the player as well as mark them as complete when necessary.

(The two functions currently in QuestManager)

Another important component of the game that has finally been finished properly is dialogue events. This was something I very briefly developed back when I first made the dialogue system, in which I promptly realised that my initial attempt at it was horribly incorrect so I tried again this week and finally have some results. The way it works is that whenever the dialogue is running and it detects that the "hasEvent" bool is enabled on the matching array index, it will run whichever event it corresponds to that the user will have set on the Unity editor.

(The event as seen in the editor UI)

(The scripts running in-game)

(The script that was being run as an event)

Admittedly it isn't the best implementation out there. Events themselves can only take one argument when running scripts and there may still need to be a lot of hard-coding for cutscenes and more complicated sequences but for things like quest activation and item rewards this should be perfect.

The last thing I worked on this week was setting up the rooms for level 1. The designers sent me their finished designs of the rooms and I spent the rest of my time placing walls and triggers for the doors and a few other miscellaneous bits. Now you can explore almost the entire first floor.

The way it is laid out is simple, the rooms are all put in the same scene but separated, since I had already made a system that plays an animation and places the player somewhere else in the scene while its playing, I asked the designers to put all of the rooms for the same level in one single scene as I would be able to take advantage of that. The only room that currently isn't accessible is the room with the staircase to the next level, which for the moment triggers dialogue explaining that the door to the room is locked.

Below is a recording of me walking through all the rooms, the camera is a bit of a work in progress right now but i currently have some code that stops moving it too far on the X axis when in the corridor, which I think looks good but as of now it is only in the corridor and not in any rooms.

As for the quests, I decided to leave those for next week after finishing everything I had done, primarily because as I'm typing this it's half past 1 in the morning and I'm tired, but also because I thought making what is essentially the entire first level function this week was a bit too much of an undertaking for just myself, as well as there still being a few things missing that I think I needed.

Reflection

Overall, I think I did much better this week compared to the last. The game feels much more like a game now that level 1 has almost been fully put together. I do regret not taking a bit more time to work on the quests, but now that everything has been put into place they should be finished off very quickly next week. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with myself and the progress that's been made this week, not only by myself, but by everyone, it really seems like the project is coming together.

That's all that I have to show this week. Next week will probably bring the quests as well as a few other cool bits and pieces. Thanks for reading once again and for following the development of Project PsychWard, see you next week.