DAY 02 – MOVEMENT AND INFINITE LEVELS

Hello random person reading my blog, unless you’re a lecturer in which case, hello amazing perfect being that will give me a good grade, pls.

Today I have worked on, as you can guess from the title, the movement and obstacle spawning mechanics of the game. I began by looking at the bird script to see what was going on with the controls. I fiddled around with the script a bunch and to my great delight, It worked! the bird flew left and right.

This Worked a lot better than I was expecting which gave me more time to work on the spawning of branches

I began working on trying to get the branches to spawn infinitely by looking at what was causing the pillars to spawn. What I found was a script that constantly referenced the X co-ordinate and barely every used the Y co-ordinate. So, in order to ratify this, I switched both the X and Y coordinates in the script. Now as I’ve said in previous posts, I am not a programmer and I don’t know how to write code, so when I did this I did it with the expectation that I was going to screw up this entire project completely and utterly.

After switching the Co-ordinates around however, It worked? It actually worked?

The branches were spawning in consistently and seemingly forever. I was honestly shocked.

How was this so seemingly easy?

After I recovered from this shock, I began to create more varied prefabs in order to try and make the gameplay a little bit more varied. I did this by simply moving some branches across to make the gap more to one side or another and prefabbed them. The script had a place where I could insert my own prefabs in engine which I used to great success. After this was done, I had in essence, a working game.

This game is currently super simple and hasn’t got very much variation. I want to add some more branch prefabs and also make it so that the level speeds up over time, increasing the difficulty of the game. I’d like to change the bird sprite to a seed too, since that was the original vision and also update all of the UI. If you look at the original concept, I had large tree trunks either side of the screen, and while this may make the game look cluttered, I want to try and give it a go in case it looks better. Also, another major thing that needs to be added is sounds, When the player gets a point, they should be notified audibly giving the player a little hit of dopamine, which should hopefully make the game more addicting to play.

Tomorrow I am unlikely to make much progress since I need to work on a pitch and pitch document for a game that I am working on with a team, ready to present on Friday. We are currently a little bit behind of where we would like to be, so my efforts tomorrow will be on that. I hope to carry on working on this until Sunday at the latest, giving me 3 days to make a 3D level design. Like I’ve said previously, I have totally screwed myself and I hope for a pass at least.

Oh, and some people have suggested to me that I could lie about the dates, and pretend I did this project in time but that would be simply lying and I’m pretty sure there is a way for them to tell if I change the upload date of this post. In fact, if you see the upload date of this post, you will notice it’s a day later than expected, and that’s because I fell asleep before hitting the publish button. Whoops. Anyway, If you’re still reading this, then I assume you kind of enjoyed it and in which case, I’m glad, perhaps I won’t fail…