Seams - Week 8

Hello and once again welcome back to the weekly (citation needed) blog for the development of my latest game, Project PsychWard (though by the looks of things we're sticking with the name 'Seams', so I might just refer to it as that from now on. This week I've been continuing the never-ending time sink that is level 1 as I've started properly scripting its cutscenes and adding in the finalised dialogue while the rest of the team works on things needed for the next levels.

Progress Throughout the Team

The level designers finished designing level 2 and pushed it to the repository on Friday. This means that as soon as I'm finished working on level 1 I can start working on level 2 immediately. They've also been working on level 3's layout simultaneously which means that level 3 shouldn't be too far behind being finished too. They also updated the hallway in level 1 with new sprites from one of our artists.

The artists have been working on a plethora of assets, including animations for some of the remaining characters, UI assets and room assets. These tend to get done pretty frequently and then pushed onto github often without me realising it, I should probably pay attention to that a little more.

The team came to a conclusion to cut the air vent minigames that we wanted to do, which eases the burden for the other programmer as it was his job, now he's working on the enemies and stealth mechanics for the night segments.

This Week's Assignment

This week, much like the last few, I've been working on level 1 with this week being spent on cutscenes and dialogue.

I hadn't really made an in-game cutscene before in any of my previous projects so I wasn't too sure where I would start. At first, I started using Unity's animator as I figured I could use that to move objects like the player in a specific way whenever I needed it to. I found out very quickly that this wouldn't work however as when I made an animation of the player moving along the hallway to play as the player entered that area, the player was no longer able to move at all even when the animation wasn't running. At first I thought this was an issue with something else related to code so I spent some time playing around with my movement script to see what the issue was. I ultimately found out what was causing problems when I deleted the animation state for the cutscene and the player was able to move again.

I couldn't figure out a way to get things working while keeping the animation state, and since it was very late at night I sought a different approach to cutscenes entirely. The cutscene in question is the first that plays, when the player walks out their room, a security guard walks them to the kitchen and then dialogue plays in there. The approach I ended up taking was having a security guard object moving to the right constantly while the player gets free movement to get their bearings (while not being able to interact with any of the other objects).

What follows after is a long set of dialogue between some of the characters in the kitchen and then the player is able to roam the room and attempt 1 of 2 quests (though the system for making sure only one of the quests can be completed hasn't been implemented yet). The plan after that is another cutscene that takes place in a separate room. After that, the player gets sent back out and are given free reign over the whole floor to do another action (though that part also hasn't been finished yet).

Reflection

This week I was moreso focused on other tasks related to my assignments rather than actual programming, so as a result of that I didn't have as much to show right now. As well as that, I'm not programming things as quickly as I would have hoped so I'll need to pick up on that. Hopefully by the end of the next week level 1 will be complete. But we'll see.

That's all I have to show for this week so once again, thank you for keeping up with the development of Seams.