Sunday 29th October 2023

Week 4

This week also started with a stand up meeting. The artist is still doing good work with no need for suggestions to improve. The other programmer’s work is very lacking, his main menu is just a text box with the wrong name for the game and a start button with code that will not work in most situations. I then showed the combination of the drag and drop and the rooms and the group was happy to see the game coming together.

After the stand up it was clear that the group is now a two man team after the other programmer’s consistent lacking work and effort. As such when it came to assignments I assigned the other programmer to work on finding SFX/Music for the game. The artist still had a list of tasks to do however as we need to have the game on the play store soon I added an app icon to their backlog and asked for it to be a priority. This week I assigned myself to work on the main menu and prepare the build for the playstore.

To start my work this week I actually delayed work on the main menu as there was other more important work to do such as adding a game win/lose screen from which the user could return to the main menu, restart the level and move onto the next level (if they won).

Now for the buttons part of this I made a somewhat questionable decision, after spending so long on figuring out how to get the new input system working for the “3D” world (the 2D sprites are in a 3D game world with the camera set to an orthographic view to give the illusion of 2D) I decided that instead of spending time working on a new 2D menu I would instead make the menu in 3D with the buttons also being in the 3D game world. This did have the added advantage of not needing to set the canvases size to make sure it worked in all resolutions as now all I needed to do was make sure the 3D world worked in all resolutions.

The buttons did take some time to figure out however by the end of it I had a button prefab where what the button does could be set in the inspector window making it much easier to use buttons in future.

Once the buttons were done the game win/lose screen came along quickly, and following this the main menu was a breeze as it is all buttons and I have those set up already. Below is a picture of how the win screen turned out.

Next I prepared the game for a build to put onto the google play store, this meant finally designing level 1 of the game.

Once this was done I did a test build and in this build I noticed that the game did not conform to the aspect ratio I was using in unity and now had skybox on the sides of the game with bits looking stretched. After some research I found a solution that involved changing the cameras rect to create black species on the top and bottom of the screen if the phone had an aspect ratio above 9:16, this effect looked very good in the end.

As you can see in the video the buttons text looks a bit off and this will be something that I fix once the first build is out, at the moment the priority is preparing the game for a testing release to get user feedback.