This is day 3 of week 12 – hand-in is tomorrow

As the last full of day of working on the project, we needed to fix the save issue. It is the number 1 priority. The rest of my work will be odd jobs to improve the overall experience of the game.

Fade-in Scene Change

I wanted to add a smooth fade-in/out effect when transitioning from the main menu to the game. It’s a subtle change, but I think it will really improve the overall flow and presentation. I used the below tutorial to do this.

In short, I created a scene controller prefab with a coroutine that will animate an image in the CanvasGroup’s alpha to fade out to black before loading the new scene, and then fade back in once the scene has loaded.

It’s a small visual polish but it helps make the shift between scenes feel more seamless.

Character Portraits

Currently, when a character task is complete both the character portrait and panel are hidden from view to be innaccesible, however I think this looks a little silly as it leaves the entire blue panel beneath looking empty.

I opened the Task Manager script and once I saw that it was a whopping 900 lines of code, I decided on a much easier solution. I created a new image object of the character portraits, greyed them out and then slot them beneath where the task panel character portrait buttons are. This way, when a task is complete, all of the Task UI will be hidden except for the separate greyed out portrait, displaying that the character’s task has been done.

Character Dialogue

With the help of Rosie, we completed the dialogue lines for each character including the addition of their expressions. There were some scaling issues but that was quickly sorted.

Here is an example of one of the complete scenes:

We aimed to keep it short while still revealing bits and pieces about the world and it’s characters, we could definitely have taken this further and improved the quality of writing; less obvious exposition, explained the character relationships better, have player dialogue responses etc.. For the time we have, it was acceptable that our dialogue was on par with a Netflix Original script.

Save Problem

Ross was able to find time to help us today and started by working on a separate branch of the game dedicated to sorting out the save problem. He was able to offer us a quick solution:

This worked! And of course, it was just one line. I also asked Joe for an update on his work.

I made a build of the game to test that everything was working which lead to a few unfortunate issues.

We were able to merge both of our branches together to create a semi-complete game however we really struggled to sort out why the tasks were no long saving between scene transitions.

I kept trying all sorts of ways to debug the problem, the camps’ state is being lost between scene transitions and the most frustrating thing is that this was not happening beforehand. I will make use of tomorrow’s emergency tech session to sort out as many problems with the game as possible.