Day04 – pandemonium
Updated: Jul 5, 2021
“I think it’s finished, Oh no that’s not good”
So, this time yesterday I was thinking that this game would have been done at a reasonable time.
Spoilers, I went to bed at 4am.
So how did this happen?
It started off well, I gathered a bunch of royalty free music and created a soundtrack for the game. After adding this to the seed, whenever you played the game, you would hear music. Next, I wanted to work on the UI.
Firstly, I needed a name for the game. I did some research into flying seeds and it turns out that they have a name. They are called samaras which I thought was a nice enough name, but I needed another word. Then it came to me, Samaras Fall. The fall because the seed is perpetually falling and also in America Fall means autumn.
Next up was actually making the UI. The background image was currently the scene with a very purple tint to it. This looked really bad, so I quickly found an image of a maple tree, which is the type of tree that produces samaras seeds and inserted it into my scene as a sprite.
Stolen from google, https://wallpaperaccess.com/maple-tree
I also added a black tint on top of it so it wouldn’t impeach upon the UI elements. I then changed the colours of all of the text to fit the autumn theme and re arranged them to fit better.
Next, I changed the particles in the scene so they would start from green and end up almost red in colour. This made the scene a lot more colourful than before.
Now I was finally done. Before I built the game, I thought it would be a good idea to tidy up the scene a bit. Earlier when I was trying to change the UI, I had to make a prefab of it in order re arrange it. I then made multiple prefabs of the UI in order to make varying changes but now I didn’t need all of the extra prefabs.
So, I started deleting the UI prefabs.
This went about as well as you imagined. I accidently deleted the actual prefab I was using which meant that the entire intro screen had gone.
After realising what I had done, I thought it would be clever to redownload the original flappy bird project and export the UI as a package, then re-import the UI into the scene. This would mean that I wouldn’t have to start from scratch and the UI would be functional again. This shortcut didn’t end up how I expected.
After importing it into my scene, I then re-made the UI how I had planned, then tested the game.
This was when I noticed the game had completely and utterly broken itself. How? you may ask.
Well, when I imported the package, it RESET EVERY SCRIPT IN THE GAME
Everything I had changed previously had broken.
I couldn’t undo what I had done.
I was screwed.
The only thing I could do was go through everything again and basically re-make the game entirely. I looked at my previous blog posts which helped me make the game vertical rather than horizontal once again. But when it came to the controls, I was screwed.
Looking at my post on Day-02, I had written “I fiddled around with the script a bunch and to my great delight, It worked!” Which at the time was great news! I had changed a few things and it worked. But this time I wasn’t so lucky. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out what I did to get it working, and eventually after lots of frustration I figured it out.
For future reference, what I did was I changed “if (wPressed)” to “if (aPressed)” and the same with down and D. I also changed it from “Vector.3.up” to “Vector3.left”. May I remind you that I am in no way a programmer and have no idea how to code.
This wasn’t all though, since when you moved left and right, the whole scene would move up or down. In order to fix this, I deleted a massive chunk of the script about making the game scroll and hoped it would work. And it did! I mean it had been many hours of trial and error up to then, but it finally worked!!!
Next, I had to look at the branches spawning. Luckily, I had some memory of doing this before, so it was only about an hour of trial and error before I got the spawning working again. I also had to re-do a lot of balancing, like the bird speed and distance of the branches from each other, but it all seems to work now which is great.
Now that the game was working again, I thought it would be a good time to try and fix the colliders on the branches. This was because whenever I play tested, I would hit an invisible collider and die despite not hitting the tree. I added a polygon collider to every branch and removed the leaves from the collider as the player could drift through them, This made the colliders a lot more accurate but when it came to playing the game. It crashed.
The colliders were way too hard to render, so I optimised them by removing a bunch of unnecessary points. Now the game ran at about 1/2FPS which was still not ideal. This meant going back and replacing all the colliders with simple box colliders and just making sure they were as accurate as I could get them. And now it worked again.
After all this misfortune and torment, I decided I would build the game and call it done. I created the build and it all functioned as intentional, It was now 4am in the morning and I was knackered so after making the build, I simply went to bed.
If I had more time, I would like to have made the textures a lot higher quality than they are, and I would have liked to add more content. One idea I had was a bird that every now and then swoops down and can kill the player if they are hit by it. Obviously, I didn’t have enough time to do this, but it would be a fun concept to include. Overall, I am relatively happy with the outcome, as it is very different to flappy bird but still has remnants of its core features.
Since I have to hand in this blog today, this will be the last post for a while because I’m not allowed to edit it while they are marking it. So, I guess for a while, until I am required to write another, Adios random person reading this unless you’re a lecturer, in which case, Thank you for actually spending the time to read this and grading my work.
UPDATE
After posting this final blog post, I worked on the game some more and gave it a visual overhaul which ads to the theme of the game. Please find attached the final game.