Week 6 Check-in

Since I'm having a break away from this project for a bit, let's analyse how things went over these six weeks of development.

TL;DR: Scope was somewhat underestimated, as some features did not fully see this version, due to either quantity or complexity. On the contrary, a significant portion of the required systems was adequately integrated, providing a reasonable analog of the intended vision of the game.

Chapters

1. Comparison to Expectations
2. Content Summary
1. Audio
2. Creatures
   
3. Scenes
4. Special Tiles
5. Spells
6. Tilemaps
7. UI
8. (other) Scripts

Comparison to Expectations

Initially during the concept stage, it was assumed that Wizard Colosseum would implement movement and stamina systems, but also that up to seven spells and up to four enemies would be made, among other things not adequately mentioned there. Since only four spells and two enemies saw completion, the anticipated features could have been met with approximately 30% greater productivity or upwards of another two weeks of development time. The main factors that lead to this discrepancy were: underestimations of difficulty and tedium of the creation of systems, the underestimation of time required to make the desired content that utilised these systems, and a lack of understanding of the functions of the underlying code best suited for these aspects (devlogs also took longer to write than I expected to).

Despite these great aspirations in the plans, the core systems were adaquately implemented for their intended purposes, as was echoed by the limited group of players who expressed satisfaction or enjoyment with the completed features during the testing phase, and rated the game highly in the testing form.

Content Summary

Audio

Only two background music tracks were used up to this point, the base ominous track and an intense track, which were switched between based on the quantity of enemies. A couple of sound effects for Spells did not quite get fully implemented. Other implied sound effects had not yet been started.

Creatures

The Creature category contained many things, but most notably the pivotal Creature Class script, which governed the basic interactions of the so-called Creatures, including movement and collision Methods. Some Derived Classes were based on this Class to apply additional functionalities, such as the ability to accept player inputs in the case of the PlayerCreature Class, and to utilise BehaviourTree Scriptable Objects to toggle random actions in the case of BehaviourCreatures. Afformentioned BehaviourTrees were made for the lich's and ghost's Prefabs, which held most of the data necessary to inform their body's actions, stats and other figures were input directly into the base script of BehaviourCreatures.

There was also a Spawner Class, which managed the instantiation of Creature prefabs at varyied random intervals, which sped up over time.

Scenes

This version of Wizard Colosseum only used one Scene, which was an unchanging arena, with the player at the centre and spawners around the edge.

Special Tiles

In the Special Tiles category were the Rule Tiles used to build the arena in a simpler manner, these being: ground, walls, and "random destrucables". Destructables were not randomly placed on startup, nor were they able to be destroyed at this point. 

Spells

Despite this limited timeframe, a significant amount of work went into features in the Spell category.

The Textures utilised in the Spell Prefabs and their particles were made by KennyNL, and a ShaderGraph was used to alter the Texture for the lightning Spell.

Each of the four implemented Spell Prefabs had a SpellHandler script, which supplied them with the necessary Methods for their desired function, and on Spell instantiation, these processed the passed values from the connected Spell ScriptableObject.

Tilemaps

The Tilemaps were both made by KennyNL (who could have guessed), and contained all the Sprites used to to make the tiles. One dungeon themed Tilemap had ample artwork for both Creatures and the environment, and the other town themed Tilemap was used to fill the corners outside the arena with grass. While it was planned to use more of the town Tilemap and others unmentioned, the features that required them were not implemented here.

UI

The UI category contained a slew of scripts and prefabs, but also some fonts and reused the Texture assets from KennyNL (honestly his stuff was a godsend). One of these Textures was used for the borders of the Spell icons, and another was planned for the background of the player's meter, but that was too complex to bring into fruition.

There was a Prefab for the Spell icon, which was duplicated to produce hotbars of any size. A seperate Prefab was used to provide health bar clones above each enemy, each bar was also driven by their own HealthBar Class script.

Two additional scripts were used as managers for the player's Spells and the hotbar, PlayerSpells made sure the player character selected and received the correct Spell, and PlayerSpellBarManager updated the appearance of the hotbar based on this selection and the time remaining until that Spell's next use.

(other) Scripts

The Location Class was used to pass a Transform alongside a static Vector, which allowed Spells the option of choice in which to target for their movement.

The CamStuff Class managed a bundle of camera-related operations, such as to: (somewhat) resize the viewport for fullscreen on non-standard monitors, detect the quantity of enemies on-screen to switch audio tracks, and accept reset keyboard inputs from the player even after death (as dedicated UI was for purpose this was not yet made at this stage).

The Utils Class provided several useful static public variables for other Classes to use, such as LayerMasks for collisions and values used in divisions. It also supplied static public Methods for manipulating Vectors, to be used in both Creature and Spell Classes.