Easter Week 2

This week I continued to work on the game, however it was at a reduced pace given how much I had done in the week before and that many of the major issues had been resolved.

Visuals

Environment

I continued to work on the visual aspect of the game. I added in lighting to the hub room and the other gate rooms. With the hub room particularly there was an odd issue where in which the sprite material of the tiles was incorrect and thus lighting would not effect them. I was unable to change the material because for whatever reason the material I needed to change it to was not available in the menu. As a result I completely deleted the tiles and re-tiled the hub world on the same layer as the other sprites that had the correct material. It worked out in the end and the hub world now had actual lighting.

I also created new floor textures for the depression gate room. These new textures were far less harsh on the eyes but were also not entirely empty; they still had some small textures on them as well as varied rocky textures scattered around. I believe I achieved a good balance of detail and visual cohesion with this redesign.

Characters

I worked on some implementation in regards to the whisper enemies. I finally implemented their attack animations which was a relatively straightforward endeavour as at this point I had a solid grasp of the Unity animator and the code necessary to get animations functional. I also adjusted the damage sprite of the whisper enemies to where they play instantaneously as opposed to before where there was a slight delay. The delay was a result of the fact that the animation included a normal idle sprite within the beginning frames which would cause the damage animation to appear delayed, I corrected this by removing those sprites altogether.

Another adjustment I made was to the protagonist attack animations. There were similar issues with unnecessary frames I had neglected to remove beforehand. After removing them the attack animations feel much smoother and seamless. I also removed the visuals of the hitbox in order to test how the accurate the attack animations feel in terms of their collision as so far people have only tested the game with the hitbox being visible.

Audio

I worked on some audio additions and changes this week as well. I added in audio for when the player heals and for when they pick up a tera shard. This was very straightforward and didn’t take much time at all to do. I looked up a shimmer effect online for the healing potion as that sort of “fresh” and “angelic” sound fit the healing concept in my opinion. For the tera shard pickup I used a retro coin pickup sound I found online as well. These may not be the final sounds for the game but it was necessary that the sounds were put in at all, now they can easily be swapped if need be.

Another lengthier addition, or rather another fix, was the whisper voice fix. To break it down the whispers, have “voice” sounds that would play upon spawning, just to give them a kind of eerie other worldly ambient sound. The issue was that the sound effect would continue to play after the whispers were killed until the entire audio file was over. So essentially you would clear out a room and the sounds could continue playing for up to 10 or 15 seconds (depending on how quickly you killed them). In order to fix this I had to alter the way in which the voice file was called by the whisper enemies. The way I had implemented audio was according a tutorial that utilized one audio manager which acted as the primary audio source, other objects would do certain actions or certain events would occur that would call on this audio manager to then play an audio clip, this caused issues in regards to the whisper voices. I first thought I could just kill the audio source by altering the block when the whisper object was destroyed and adding in a line that would end the audio. However, due to the fact that multiple whisper objects would be in the same room, this solution didn’t work and instead resulted in the whisper voice not functioning at all. The solution transpired to be that the whispers had to directly call the audio clip of the whisper voice themselves rather than utilizing the audio manager to activate it for them.

Instead of using the audio manager for the voices I would use an “audio source” which would make the source the whispers instead. This way I was able to put in a line that would end the audio source from functioning rather than disable something in the audio manager. This solution fixed the problem and now the whispers finally cease their whispering upon death.