If you would like to look into a more in depth analysis of this prototype, here is a link to my breakdown in my portfolio: Joe

Whats going on in this prototype:

• Since the last prototype we had a playtest. Simply though as a group we decided the game needed a revamp, what was included in this revamp was removing the current drag & drop mechanic and replacing it with a smoother and more user friendly drag and drop mechanic. In addition to further make the game user friendly it was noted that the camps placeholders were confusing the players and it would make sense for the characters to all just be placed into one camp similar to the first prototype, the issue in doing this was keeping the characters benefits as the whole reason i added the placeholders was to determine if a character should receive a bonus or not. Lastly, the final thing noted was too many things happening on the screen and the actual camp area was too small.

Implementing the character drag and drop feature:

• What should have been a simple implementation turned out to be the second biggest issue I’ve faced in this project so far. From one bug to another this implementation challenged me in so many ways. Some of the reoccurring issues were that the character gameobject couldn’t detect if the mouse had clicked it or continued to click it, another issue was that each time the character gameobject was clicked to be dragged it got sent to the back of the hierarchy and therefore disappeared. But after re-writing the script, and changing the scenes hierarchy and multiple google searches of different error codes i got the drag and drop feature working. So as you can see in the video, the player drags each character and drops them into the camp and similar to before just clicks them to reset their position. 

Prototype 6 ext shows my idea of creating a tutorial section:

• During the playtest it was also noted that players couldn’t seem to understand the purpose of the game. This meant during the playtests i had to physically write a tutorial. To fix this i created a simple tutorial script that made the players click through a sequence of instructions circling and describing the different gameobejects. This will mean players can hopefully understand how to play the game.

Changing current placeholder system:

• As I said in my last paragraph, the drag and drop feature was the second biggest issue I faced – this feature was the biggest issue I’ve had to face so far. What looks simple and almost seamless took days of  focus on this one component. I had to go back to page one when thinking of how to achieve a one camp system that still determines whether to give a certain character a benefit. To simplify how I developed this system I gave each character an assigned value 0-3, I then gave each character a preferred camp ID from 0-4. Then each camp was given an ID from 0-4. After I had set this up in the inspector of the characters and camps I then had to worry about characters actually being able to be dropped into these camps. I did this mainly through the drag and drop mechanic by detecting if they are over a camp and if so then the camp determines if there is a free slot in the camp and allows the character to be placed and if not once the character is dropped its position is reset to its original position. 

Revamping entire project:

• In addition to adding these features, I revamped all the scripts by reducing the reliance on game manager script, camp manager script and click and drop script. I created multiple scripts to do specific purposes in an effort to erase bugs and issues caused by conflicting lines of code in these scripts. By doing this it has also reduced the lines of code and made every script a lot more readable and easier to change and adjust their functions without breaking the game. This is a small change but was time consuming and should hopefully allow me to make changes to my project in the future significantly easier

After this prototype was created I showed the group the development however, we came to the conclusion that even more significant changes needed to be made. So, after playtesting this prototype and taking on the feedback from the playtest 2 we decided to come up with a plan as to where we are going to take this project. All this information can be found on our WEEKLY MEETINGS and my personal portfolio where i go into the technical side of the change HERE.