Game 1 design process (catch up post - Part 5)

After that I went back to revisit my map and game flow, and cut it right back. After discussing with Paul, he recommended adding an extra path to "home" for a bit of variety. One path is free of obstacles but narrow, which makes it hard to bounce through. The other path is fairly wide but has obstacles which can make the tar bubble bounce around and get stuck.

The updated map etc looked like this:

Once that was done it was kind of obvious that the original plans for motive decay really weren't going to work, but the timer would. It looked like it would have to be a race - get your bubble to "home" as quickly as possible. I may even put in a high score tracker, if there is time. For my second GUI element I'll probably add a health bar.

So with the assets pretty much done, it was time to return to the dreaded coding side of things. Now I'll freely admit here that coding is not my forte, at all. I'm really not good at it. At all. I'm okay following tutes and stuff, but making it up on my own is where I fall down. So anything I do has to be really simple and easy.

Because I played around in Unity a lot making things that could possibly work for the game, I ended up with about five different project files, all called similar things. Which was as confusing as hell, so I ended up deleting them all and starting a new one, giving it a sensible name.

That was also good because I could remake everything from scratch.

The base plane for the ground was done and textured, I added a background plane and textured it, and that was my basic environment done.

After that I started dropping in boundary bushes to make a path. Which was pretty tedious. Once I had a basic path shape done, I added in the obstacles: thorn bushes and logs. Then I added the hero sphere and played with his settings to actually get him to work properly. Eventually that was done.

Once all that was set up, I started on a basic GUI, making a title page. I looked up various ways of making interactive buttons that would fit the design. However as it turned out the previous day version 4.6 Beta of Unity was released which has inbuilt GUI options. Yay! So that's what I'm implementing. So far it seems to work okay...

I made my title screen and added in the hero prefab with a simple animation to bounce him up and down. I made a credits screen and added a help screen for the controls. I made text images for the GUI buttons and set those up.

Essentially at this stage most of the game is done - for a prelim web build at least. I haven't added in the timer yet or the health bar, I haven't made any sounds yet, and I'm yet to do a win/lose screen, but the vast majority of it is done.