At long last, the finale is here! I’ve had a great time working with DVNC, and this week is no different. Let’s break it down one last time!
Basement Built!
My first order of business these week, unsurprisingly, was finishing up the basement. Using the method I described last week, I was able to reorganize most of the sprites in the scene to follow the proper layering order. Like I said last time, however, it isn’t a perfect solution, and there are a few times where player can appear underneath a sprite they should be on top of. These issues are relatively minor, but I will attempt to move these problem sprites in a manner that will hide the graphical error from view.
A few rounds of playtesting revealed another interesting bug; the parts of the crowd that would vanish would reappear after battles. The crowd acts as a sort of blockade to prevent the player from moving forward and can only be cleared by destroying speakers. However, entering fights with these speakers would inadvertently regenerate any parts of the crowd previously cleared, eventually trapping the player. In order to preserve the state of the crowd, they had to be inputted to a large Spawn Manager table. Not the hardest fix in the world, but an important insight to the machinations of the scene.
Perhaps the most baffling issue I came across were missing collision boxes. This is an issue I faced previously; objects that appeared to have colliders in the editor lacked any such collision in the game itself due to an oversight of the type of box collider used. In order to behave properly, the colliders must be specifically 2D colliders; the standard 3D variants simply have no presence in a flat game world. Fixing the issue, while simple, was somewhat alarming to me; with so many broken collisions with such a random variety of objects in the scene, its not too hard to imagine similar issues in other scenes in the game. I suggest a thorough exploration of the scene hierarchies to find misused 3D colliders as to not create more issues.
With all those issues accounted for, the scene has been prepared and is nearly 100% complete. The only task that remains is allowing the player to talk to a handful of NPCs, a task that I’m already quite familiar with. After that, the basement will be completed at long last! (Or at least until the next major scene update is issued!)
Hotel Compiled
I wasn’t able to create any more full hotels that I was completely satisfied with this time around, but I was able to design a few key aesthetics that I think work very well. The image below shows off a few of the ideas I was working with; curly iron decoration, simple sleazy-looking elegance, and a sense of dubious old-timey luxury. While not as extravagant as full hotel design, I think that these sort of design aesthetics could work well when applied to my previous designs.
Compiling all the hotel images together into one image will be my last step before my official upload. Here’s hoping one of them makes it into the final game!
Next Week
Since this the last week of my co-op, I likely wont be continuing with these dev logs or major scene updates going forwards. However, I definitely will continue to stay in touch, and may also submit a few more concepts for SNAK3’s environment as well. It’s been a great time working with everyone!
This Week’s Media: Cave Story
By no means a recent event at all, I’m here to talk about one of my earliest game design inspirations that I’ve recently rediscovered: Cave Story. This indie game was made by one man over the course of 5 years, and was considered to be one of the first big indie hits. If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it. One last game I suggest before I wrap up!