Week 22 (Sep 30th - Oct 6th)

Playtesting 3:

Some second year game design students came into our class and tried out our games. I had two students play my game, and I got some decent feedback on my current build that I immediatly implemented into the game:

Made fires from the mech damageable from inside the mech chasis by searching for the fire layer in the extinguisher raycast, and stopped fires from spawning unless the coolant is being run so players have time to think.

Also both player's felt the pickup range for resources was too low, so I increased it. This means player's don't have to crouch down to grab resources from the ground anymore., which makes refuelling feel less tedious.

When watching other peoples game's in class, I realised how static my fire extinguisher felt, so I added a firing animation which gives players better feedback while using it.

I also found a bug where if player's ran out of fuel while zipping, they could still zip, and if they ran out of fuel and aimed at a Hook Point, they could connect and reel in to it. Since the mech's Fuel is meant to represent the player's ability to make progress towards Terminus, it felt right to stop player's from being able to zip while out of fuel. So I added a simple line to Unhook the mech if it's fuel is empty.

Tar Tunnel LC:

This week I developed the final Level Chunk of the game: Tar Tunnel. Here, player's are faced with a cave tunnel with a floor of toxic tar that traps and kills players, and sinks the mech before doing the same. To cross the tar covered floor, players must shoot staglactites down from the roof of the cave to create a path to a couple damaged Hook Points to make it to the other side (and collecting resources on the way).

Making this LC work was pretty fun, as creating the code for the stag's to fall when shot was easy to make, and turned out nicely. What did make it tedious was finding the right heights for each individual stag, so that they wouldn't clip to badly into the caves roof, while still landing at the right height to match the rest of the path layed out by other stags. This is because all the stag's use the same coroutine to set their individual rigidbodies kinematic, so they can not be kinematic to fall and return to normal after a few seconds. But once they we're all lined up, it worked great.

The next step was to add some polish. I followed a few tutorials on shader graphs to get my tar lake to have a bit of visual depth, and have a foam outlining intersecting objects. This gave a slight feel of realism, and is a nice extra detail to the tar river. Along with some bubble particle systems to lay the surface, with popping bubble audio to match, helps to distinguish this LC visually and audiblly from the Acid Lake. To take thing's a step further, since the mech can sink into the tar, I created a post proccessing profile that creates the feeling of seeing underwater (or under tar here) with blurred dark visuals that change when players enter the tar. Details like this really help tie the LC together, and feel more like a real environemnt rather than a bunch of assets put together.

LC Revamps:

Geyser Fields:

After the playtesting sessions, I came to realise how flat and somewhat unimaginative the terrain for th Geyser Field LC was. So I modelled a new floor that's more vaired in it's elevation, and forces players to engage witht he Geysers more to gain resources and make their way through, whereas in the old version of the LC player's could easily avoid the geyser's without even trying. But now, they must go out of their way to time and manuever around them to gain access to mech resources.

Zip River, Down Low and Dividium:

I also realised that the current LC's in the second half of the game had a major design fault: If the mech ran out of any resources, player's had no way of getting to and from the island's that require the Line Launcher to cross.

So I took the time to add a large amount of pilot focused paths to each LC, which has in turn made the proccess of gathering resources in these LC's feel more thrilling and engaging. Because the new required cognitive load on player's through platforming makes the expirence more tense, and therefore exciting.

I also made an update to the pressure plates, by adding audio for when they move to and from their start and end positions, and fixed the jittery movement on the elevator type platforms that was a result of the Pilot or Mech not being parented to them during movement. Rectifying this made them work as desired, but intially I through this wouldn't work as the collider that enter the pressure plates are children of the actual Pilot and Mech, and would be detattched when they were parent to the platfrom and cause the pilot or mech to fall through them. But by parenting the parent of th collider entering the pressure plate, I was able to sidestep this issue.

Acid Lake:

And after working on the new river depth, foam splashing shader graph tecniques and underwater post proccessing for the Tar Tunnel, I went back to the Acid Lake and applied them in similar fashion, but with green coloration. The Acid Lake also got some updates to the container dropping sequence for the end of the LC's puzzle, with new audio for when the container hit's the water, and splash effects for each of it's impacts.

Damage Audio and Self-Destruct:

I added audio for when players take damage. originally tried to just turn a bool off within the playerhealth script that would cycle a set of damage sounds in a list, but the bool didn't want to work properly, as my health regeneration uses an 'else if' statement, which bool's don't seem to like. So instead, the damage check script has individual audio sources related to each damage type bool, which also allows for unique damage sounds for each corresponding damage type.

The final addition for the week is the Self Destruct Sequence, which gives players the option to blow up the mech and fail the mission if they are fully out of coolant or fuel. I added this in to replace the restart button in the menus, to prevent player's from cheesing the LC system to get the excat run they're after. By holding down X for 3 seconds, an explosion particle system and screen shake will play, and players will be damaged by a collider and die.

While implementing this feature I discovered that if the player put out a fire in the mech, the fire effects added to the mech's interior would not turn off, because they didn't think the fire had been set to null. So I changed the condition for this to be based on a bool which get's switched off when a fire object is destroyed.