JELLE VAN DOORNE - GAME & NARRATIVE DESIGN
  • Home
  • Portfolio
    • Angela's Wedding Disaster
    • Angela's High School Reunion
    • Angela's Fashion Fever
    • Viola
    • Press Q To Stop Time
    • SECRET
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Presskit

Double Whammy

30/6/2018

1 Comment

 
This week I worked on two mechanics: getting healing items and switching party members. I figured this would fit in one week since I wanted this to be done with a single menu screen. However, the amount of programming and design work ended up being far more than I thought. In hindsight, I should've split this up into two separate weeks. The mechanics ended up working great, though.

Click 'Read more' to read more.

Potions

Chests and potions were decently easy to do. Get close to a chest, press X to open it, and add a potion to an ItemHandler, stored in the PartyHandler object to carry it through different scenes.
Picture
There's space in the Item Chest script for different items later on: just create a different bool and method to trigger.
Picture
The code used to get items from chests.

Party Menu

The Party Menu can be summoned by pressing Y. Creating this ended up being the real challenge of the week. This menu is completely reliant on the PartyHandler and its internal stats tracker, since it has to show which characters are currently slotted as well as their stats. On top of that, it doesn't need to just show things, it also needs to change them, requiring multiple selections and button presses. It was a hefty bit of UX and UI work to get this menu to feel right. The tiniest change or incorrect implementation would end up immediately ruining the entire experience. Needless to say, I learned a lot, and also had a lot of headaches over it.
Picture
There are still a few things necessary to make this menu feel completely juicy, but the interaction is fully intact. I'll still need:
  • A full, appealing visual.
  • Sound effects when selecting and changing members.
  • An extra 'selector' when initially choosing a member to swap.
  • Sound effects when healing party members with potions.
  • A particle effect when healing a party member.
I'll do this much later, when I decide to focus on visuals for the entire game. Right now, there are more important visuals to take care of, such as the level, and there are still a few incomplete gameplay mechanics and interactions.

The code itself is pretty long, and slightly messy. There are a lot of if statements: the UI elements for the party members are pulled out of the PartyHandler and its stats tracking component. Two giant methods with 9 if statements each for each character. That makes for a giant script, but since If statements are not very costly, the menu ends up working very smoothly. New characters are also simple to add: just copypaste the elements and rename them. For the vertical slice, however, I'm probably sticking to these 9 characters, potentially even cutting some of them if players find them unappealing.

Next week, I'm taking a break from programming to focus on adding visuals to the level, such as backgrounds and maybe some player animations.
1 Comment
Tucker C link
1/7/2022 22:36:48

Hi

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Tweets by GameViola

    About

    This is a development blog for my own game project, "Viola".

    Picture

    Archives

    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018

    Categories

    All
    Art
    Design
    Music
    Programming
    Story
    Viola

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    RSS Feed

Site

Portfolio
About
​Contact
  • Home
  • Portfolio
    • Angela's Wedding Disaster
    • Angela's High School Reunion
    • Angela's Fashion Fever
    • Viola
    • Press Q To Stop Time
    • SECRET
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Presskit