Weekly Devlog 5 - Testing

This week I focused on polishing off my game a bit, starting by getting feedback on the Monday tutorial. 

Feedback: I should make it more obvious that souls are lost when shooting a fire ball, so I created a pop up panel on the first shot that warns the player that shooting uses a soul. I found it quite challenging trying to stop the movement of the player and all the enemies, without just disabling  the game object as I don't want those objects to momentarily disappear. When a panel is open, it passes a boolean to a separate script which starts a coroutine  that is attached to each moving object, which sets that object's velocity to zero, and then resets it back to normal after two seconds. I set it to two seconds as most all of my pop up panels are set to two seconds, however I will need to fix this when  I have the time to reset objects' velocities when the boolean gets reassigned, as there are some panels that are player dependent on when they close, meaning the game might need to be paused for longer than two seconds (as seen below). 

To make the scenery more cohesive, I ended up finding some more relevant spites  (bones, skeletons, dead, trees etc), and deleted the rocks and minerals to prevent it from looking like a spooky cave. I also created cloud spawner, that spawns clouds within a box collider using a coroutine. The clouds are transparent so it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. 

Someone mentioned that they weren't sure whether they had gone through the door as they walked off after opening it, so I edited the pausing motion script so that while the animation of the door opening is happening, the player freezes. I also changed the colour of the door inside the game room so it was a little more clear you had changed rooms. 

I ran in to a problem when entering doors; I noticed that both spawners stopped spawning once the main game object (parent) was deactivated, despite itself not actually being deactivated. I looked it up and since the coroutine is implemented during start, turning off a parent object ends the coroutine and it won't continue when it is enabled again. Having  the coroutine start in an if statement doesn't work as the coroutine will be implemented multiple times, so I wanted to use on enable. I had to create a new script on the main game object, not on the spawner objects, which starts the coroutine again. 

Some people found my game to navigate, but my game is purposefully hard to traverse as it is an exploration game. Someone suggested perhaps adding a minimap, however I thought that would make it a little too easy, so I compromise and included that if they player presses L (for location), Lich's integer coordinates will be displayed in the bottom left; float would be too long and look messy. 

Testing:

Testing went pretty smoothly which is great! Everyone who played found the difficult just right, likewise with the camera scale which has been a concern previously. There was one spot that Lich got stuck between two game objects, so I need to go through and thoroughly check the spacing between collidable objects. Someone ran into an issues with a door or chest not opening but didn't mention where so I will do a full play through this week to check all chests and doors. (A possibility is that they completed a game room and ended up coming back to the same door, not realising it was the same door, and hence been confused on why it wouldn't open, as I've set the door to remain closed on  completion.  A sound for shooting should be implemented, to make the gameplay feel a little better, which I will do this week. I might slightly reduce the size of the map, as I feel people are wandering around a little too long without finding the points of interest. As I was watching someone play, I felt like I didn't see many clouds, so I might tweak the cloud spawner to spawn more regularly.