October 13, 2022
I had a rather busy week with my other courses so this journal won’t be nearly as full as some of the others, but I still got a fair number of things done. For one, I migrated my project from the Built-In Renderer to URP, which was much more of a hassle than I expected (I should’ve made my project with URP to begin with).
The reason I switched to URP was because I’m eventually going to use Unity’s Shader Graph feature for some effects on magical abilities and enemies, and I figured it’d be easier to deal with sooner rather than later.
For gameplay, I’ve still been working in my Demo scene, testing out the different elements. I figured in the meantime I should start putting together my menu structure, so I at least have the barebones in place to hook up when I inevitably come back to it at the end of the project to link my main gameplay scene to the shell menu.
I have currently implemented a splash screen with a loading bar that asynchronously loads the next scene (the “Menu” scene), and launches it once it’s finished loading. For the menu, I have mocked up some basic UI. None of it is currently functional, but I do have a blurred background gameplay loop working, which was a feature I thought would be fun to have in the menu.
I made a few adjustments to the floating player status bar. The corners are now rounded and the text width is now fixed to always fit inside the box (even with the 6 character limit, things like “WWWWWW” were a nightmare in terms of width). I’ve also added a segmented health bar so that players can be easily see how much health they have as they progress and acquire runes that increase their maximum health (e.g. one segment may represent 10 HP). Finally, I have added two circles that are placeholders for icons or radial progress bars that will represent when attacks/abilities are either ready or are on cooldown, respectively.
Finally, the main thing I implemented this week was enemy pathfinding around obstacles using A* search. The search is extremely quick because the game was already designed with large grid squares, which were also really handy to use for the algorithm itself— I didn’t have to generate an obstacle grid map or anything like that.
I have added a quite a bit of smoothing on the enemy turning to face the direction of the path, as it was seeming to be a bit jittery with such a large grid size. It still isn’t perfect. Sometimes enemies briefly spin themselves around in a circle or take a jerky path when the route is just a straight line. There are certainly improvements to be made, and with a larger grid size, I think an “any-angle path planning algorithm” such as Theta* could be a cool alternative. In any case, it’s good enough for now and I think I’m ready to flesh out the combat for my “First Playable” submission and looking forward to playtesting.
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