Third Week; Gamify-ing the Game

The next step, after creating the enemies and players functionalities, animation, and sounds, was to begin working on the game level itself. I began with the terrain, which proved difficult in and of itself simply because I had never touched the Unity terrain tools before. And for a solid day I just went and tried to make a half decent base I could lay everything down in. I searched for tutorials to brush up on some beginner skills that would make the level feasible to walk around in, through those I found a terrain tool kit through the Unity package shop which made things much more intuitive and allowed me to create something I wasn't quite proud of... but I was okay with it. And with such a tight timeline, I was okay with just being okay with it. 

The following day or two was simply gathering building models from Sketchfab that fit the vibe and aesthetic of the game, with the two caveats that they had to be free-use licensed, and they had to be free in general. Surprisingly (Or maybe unsurprisingly) that was a pretty hard task to complete. I also wanted to ensure that I kept the count of tris and polys down in order to not bog down the game at all... In the end, I went with somewhere between eight and twelve different building variations that were duplicated and placed around the map, along with a few one offs that were more significant; including a church with a graveyard in it's backyard, a tower in the town square, and a battle palace in that same square. Although we don't get to see the latter two much, so they may be wasted tris.

After building the level, I focused on placing in the player and enemies, and baking in their Navmesh maps as well as the Occlusion maps. However, a different path had to be taken as the enemies slid over the navmesh when left to their own devices for too long. So the new plan was simple, a hitbox trigger that would spawn enemies at designated locations if a bool was false; this bool would then be set to true when the player touched the trigger. The enemies spawns were always set to be right outside the players view to give the illusion that they were there all along.

Now that the level and enemies were dealt with, it was time for random drops. This part was also simple and on the quicker side of things. I implemented Oliver's scripts he had created for the items by attaching them to the enemy death function, and to a crate that would break on contact with the player character. The only minor change I made to the method was to make the dropped item it's own parent so it wasn't bound to the spawning objects scale or lifespan. 

And finally, I made the UI. A pause menu that would hold the menus for the Godly Boons, which wouldn't be implemented within the demo; the weapons page; the inventory page from which players could use their items; and the options page which would end up being mostly for show aside from quitting in the demo as well.