Seams - Week 6

Hello once again and welcome back to yet another blog post for Project PsychWard. There's been a lot of things coming from my end this week so let's dive straight into it.

This week's assignment

This week was pretty much a continuation of last week in completing level 1. This time working on the quests for this level. Getting started there are 3 quests in level 1. All three of them are supposed to involve solving a puzzle though programming the UI for even one of those took a fair amount of time to get working properly so for the moment I made sure to get the logic for them working at the very least (e.g. grab an item to unlock a new path you couldn't take previously) next week I will get those UIs sorted (at least in some capacity).

Making the quests function did end up being a bit nicer with the already existing back end I made for the quests. The way the logic works right now is that on certain triggers, a quest is added to a list stored in the Player class called currentQuests, the quest object itself contains all the information that needs to be displayed on any UI in which it becomes a matter of just checking that you actually have the quest when running code specific to it.

Quests can be obtained in numerous ways though the most likely one would be through talking with a character, or interacting with a different object. At the moment, there isn't any explicit system for having regular intractable objects giving out quests but with the dialogue system it is easy to add an event that assigns a specific quest.

(An NPC's dialogue component, during its dialogue a quest will be activated, alongside spawning a different version of the object so that the quest isn't given out twice)

Another thing that is now being utilised are items. I added the item class a while ago in preparation for when I'd need to use them and now with the implementation of the quests they can be put to use. The Player class has a list for storing items acting as the inventory and during the quests in this level a few different items will appear and disappear from your inventory.

I managed to implement the UI for one of the quests this week. This UI is for a puzzle in which the player must take a spoon out of a cutlery drawer (very basic I know, but its supposed to be one of the very first things the player does in the game). Upon interacting with the object to bring up the UI, the player is given the quest to take the spoon, and they then must click and drag the object into their hand, which completes the quest and gives them a plastic spoon in their inventory. Currently the puzzle uses placeholder assets due to them not being complete yet, but have a look at how it plays below:

The little popup for getting an item and quest was a bit of a last minute addition. I created a notification class with coroutines that attach the quest/item name to the notification sprite and play the animation of them entering, waiting a few seconds, then playing the animation of them exiting the screen.

(The coroutine for displaying the quest notification)

Yet another thing I got done this week is an item pickup system of sorts that allows me to put a prefab somewhere on the map, and assign an item to it so that when a player interacts with it, it will give them the specific item assigned. It has a little animation I created myself, it's meant to be a sort of shine to show that there's something of interest there. It probably isn't a final animation but for now I think it does a good job. Have a look at it in the video below:

Reflection

Looking back now I feel like I could've done at least some sort of basic UI puzzle for the other two quests this week, and that since I didn't, I just made the code for it more confusing and hard to work with later (something I guess I'll find out next week).

Some of the code for events during the quests is quite messy, I'm swapping around a lot of objects that do very slightly different things from each other (e.g. triggers that allow you to move forward on the quest) and I think I could've possibly made a system that would allow me to make these things cleanly.

Overall That's all I have to show this week. For me there was a much larger focus on events and the game's backend this week and that will probably continue into next week. We'll see. For now, thanks for continuing to read about the development of PsychWard, I look forward to what will get done in the next few weeks.