Devlog #3 - Presentation and Graphics

As I haven't completed most of my KIT109 tutorials, I don't have any idea if I'm doing things right or not, but they're working. I didn't know most of the things I've used so far and been learning in the process. A few YouTube videos have been of great help and Copilot is literally a blessing in AI form. I know maybe I should've worked on interactive things first, like enemies, health, bullet counts, reload and most importantly, time manipulation, which is undoubtably the coolest thing I thought for this game but working with no visuals of what I'm doing really gets on my nerves. Therefore, I've worked on visuals and level designs more.

Main Menu and Other Scenes

The game now has a Main Menu consisting of 4 buttons (Play Game, Tutorial, Settings, Quit Game). 

The Tutorial button should take to another scene for tutorials for this game, which I've planned to be an interactive one, like the main game scene. As most of my work on game scene is still to be done, I haven't started anything about the tutorial scene yet, I'm planning of coming right at it when I'm done with enemies.

The settings button doesn't quite do anything for now, I'm just planning a scene with adjustable controls over music volume.

Quit Game button obviously just quits the game. I'm thinking of trying a popup for confirmation, not sure if I'll come to this.

Let's head back to the Play Game button. It basically takes us to a hidden scene that looks basically the same as the main game scene but just with no interactions at all. Except, the scene has a button taking over the entire screen that says, "click on the screen to start" and it takes to the actual game scene, starting the game. It's a cheap yet effective trick for the game to have a functionality as such.

I'm using the previous SceneSwitcher script to achieve switching.

Level Design and Death

I've designed a few terrains and up for designing rest of the level right after dealing with Enemies. I'm planning a Level Complete panel when Dino reaches a certain point by assigning that specific point as a trigger, will find out if it works or not. For now, the ground looks good and water basically kills him.

Not all designs are interactive, of course. Some of them are placed behind the Layer Dino is in and some are in front of him. I've designed these terrains with a tileset I got for free from Platformer.

Colliding with a cactus not only stops time now but also makes a Game Over panel appear that contains a restart and a main menu button. The restart button calls back to the DinoClassic (main game) scene and sets the timescale back to 1, creating the effect of restarting the level. The main menu button just switches to the Main Menu scene. Dino going offscreen does the same work as Dino colliding with a Cactus. Just so it doesn't look odd when dino falls a pit, I've thought of adding water, filling up the pits which basically makes a shotgun carrying dinosaur not knowing how to swim.

Dino character design and animation is just taken from Jurassic Dino Game Sprite as I'm too lazy to draw.

Other Updates and Bug Fixes

The cursor now goes invisible when playing the game and appears when Game Over screen appears. I've done it by using Cursor.Visible method in my DinoController script.

The background effect looks cool, right? I've just used a 3D plane to do it. Added sliding effect to 4 different planes (Sky, Sun, Mountain and Ruins that I got from the same place as the tileset) and customized their speed to get this cool effect. I've learned this from Comp-3 Interactive - YouTube.

The gun shooting glitch is fixed.

Copilot: I've been using Copilot for generating codes for my game as I am unfamiliar with C#, just understand a few indexes which seem similar to python. Most of my time behind this game goes behind explaining what I exactly want or about an edit I need to make on my codes to Copilot.

And this is where I got the font from: Stone Punk