Quality of Life, Fleshing out

The game has come a long way up to this point, but there are many issues that have built up that need to be addressed. After giving the game to two people to play test, they have managed to find a few bugs that really need to be fixed before continuing as I don’t want them to build up and be forgotten about. Doing this now brings a nice quality of life to the game, but also allows me to tweak some current features to make the game more playable.

The first issue that needed to be addressed is a major gameplay issue with the ladders. After implementing, I thought that although they didn’t match the grid squares, they couldn’t be placed on top of other objects. This however was not the case, as one tester found that falling and placing resulted being able to place them anywhere. One fix that I put in place immediately is one that stops the Player from placing them while they are not on a ground tile. This means that if they are not standing on a solid tile or ladder, they are not able to place a ladder. I then went on to fix the ladder positioning, meaning that when placed, they couldn’t be in the middle of a square. I did this by taking the player’s x coordinate and flooring it -meaning that the ladder could only be placed on an integer value -which in turn aligned them with the rest of the level assets.

After implementing the quality of life changes I thought it was time to add in a game over screen. This screen will be shown whenever the Player dies. Unfortunately, due to the way I have set it up, it was not possible to create this the way I wanted it due to the time constraints. The end result of what I would have liked was a way of passing the damage type (from DamagePlayer function) to the end game screen. For now, the message simply reads “You have died”. The way I achieved the end screen was from the DamagePlayer function that I created earlier.

Additionally, parts of the game needed fleshing out. Although I had created the sprites for the ores, along with scripts, they didn’t actually do anything as the scripts were empty. This needed changing, so I made sure that all variables within the dirt script were generic, such as the current and maximum health. This means I could just simply copy and paste the code for each ore and change the values for each one accordingly. Initially upon creating the ore, I was going to use prefabs. This system could have been developed much better if I had of known about scriptable objects.