Senior Production
Post VIII
This week continues a similar trend to the previous week. Most of my efforts have been focused towards continuing to build and improve the systems in our game. Being a huge fan of cool systems and hierarchy based systems, i’ve been going nuts over the structure of everything. Sadly, a lot of the work is in the backend and is hard to show, however, there is a bit of gameplay features that are new to the game as a result of these systems being developed which I will show in this week’s post.
For starters, lets revisit the topic of interactable objects and the inventory. I have overhauled these systems a bit this week and some of the improvements include being able to remove items from the inventory, being able to drop items, more functionality such as handling events like being equipped/unequipped, being dropped and more. The player is also capable of reloading items which is a feature used by the flares (and soon to be flashlights) to turn on the flare (essentially striking the flare with the friction cap to ignite it). Another feature (although still needing improvement) is dropping items. While still in its early stages, it is important to the gameplay. I could keep rambling on about the systems, but seeing as there isn’t much to show for it (visually speaking), i’ll skip to the more visually interesting things.
One of the features which was added last week was the ability to interact with objects properly using E. You would see this popup on your screen when you looked at an item which was allowed to be interacted with. An example of this was the box of flares which would give you a flare to use. This week, I was also able to add a feature called reloading. In our game, there will definitely come a time when you need to “reload” your flare or flashlight because they ran out. And since flares don’t just magically start lit up, this was how we would start a flare. In terms of the flashlight, this would bring you to a small “minigame” per say where you would need to perform an action to recharge your battery. I also managed to get an important feature working in our game which is the ability for light sources to be expendable. Previously, they were infinite only because I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This was further pushed on the flashlight specifically giving it a flickering which shows up when the batter is low and an increased flickering right before dieing. A neat little feature which will hopefully inform the player of the time left with their light without needing UI. Below are a few gifs of these actions. I apologize in advance for their terrible quality but i’m not exactly very good at doing gifs.
Flare Dropping
Flare Reloading
Flicking Flashlight
As for the challenge we did last week, the good news is we passed and are now chugging towards reaching the Vertical Slice Stage. The obvious bad news is that we have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to make it to that stage. We are all excited to have the opportunity to push forward into next semester and are definitely hoping that we will be one of the games chosen to move on after the “cuts” in a few weeks.
Tune in next week for more updates on my progress with the prototype. This coming week will likely involve further pushing our existing systems to create mechanics as well as fixing some nasty item bug which is causing the game to crash. Oh the joys of programming.
TL;DR:
- I made more systems and improved existing systems
- Light sources are expendable
- Items can be reloaded
- We passed our challenge
- We have a game breaking bug 🙁