Weekly Journal 13 - December 14, 2022

Team's progress:

We finally wrapped up the project and submitted the gold code and the report last Friday. We showcased our game to our other classmates and got to see the labors of everyone's hard work.

My contributions:

It was a difficult last week as I had another final project due 2 days before this one as it's the end of the semester when everything is due at the same time. It was another project based Android course, which was another term project to wrap up.

However in those 2 days I got a lot of stuff done. I changed the attack and range animations of the player with new ones that look way more fluid and the ranged orb animation as well. I also changed all the hurt animations for the enemies with new ones. I changed the solid sprites with a new lava animation and got a rocky background from Ray to use instead of the solid color background I was using. The rocky background wasn't easily "tileable" and didn't blend into the above ground parallax background at all, so I had to use a combination of Paint and some free online tools to fumble around and make the underground background match well. Somewhere along the way of merging Pouria and my changes, some changes I thought I made were lost, the same happened to Pouria so we spend a little time redoing the changes we had made. I knew that we had a "cinematic" animation created for just before the area 1 boss but found out we had it for the area 2 boss and final boss as well. I added these cinematics to all the bosses. I also added the animation/logic for the guardian waking up, and going back to sleep after defeating the final boss. We also needed a starting UI menu to start/quit the game. I am not very familiar with menus in Unity, so on the last day I implemented it. Finally I tuned some parameters like health, skill cooldowns and fixed other bugs. I added camera shaking on taking damage and at the end of the game when the giant tree transforms.

Here's a video of the playthrough. The start menu and guardian going to sleep/waking up are not shown. Some bugs like the deer continuing to slide after dying are shown which were eventually fixed. It shows how late we left some stuff. A lot of changes were still made in the day after the video was due, and before the showcase.

Reflection:

Some bugs still made it through into our game on the final showcase which was a bummer. Ideally the game would have been finished at least a week before so that we could just spend the last moments bug fixing, but we were still implementing things until the final hours. Overall it was a great semester, and I learned a lot. It was a pleasure working with the teammates I had and am proud of the game we made.