Entering and Exiting Battles

This week, I worked on letting the player enter and exit battles. With this feature, the levels are now actually playable! They were, there was just nothing to do in these levels. Now there is! I'm still missing a few features to really call it "complete", but I'm getting there.

Click 'Read more' to read more about this week's activities.

Transfers

Exiting and entering scenes means singletons that remember data. Since the SavaData and PartyHandler already do their own things, I decided to make a new one: the TransferHandler.

The TransferHandler is pretty simple. Other scripts point towards the handler to change the player's new spawn position when returning to the level. It also keeps track of whether the monster has been destroyed. If the player runs away, it's obviously not destroyed.

Touching a monster transfers its data to TransferHandler. When loading the battle scene, its components look at TransferHandler to do the following things:

• Deciding a random amount of monsters based on the maximum
• Spawning monsters
• Changing the background image

I also did some extra detail work, as seen in the video. Particle effects, primarily, which I was curious about regarding the new Shuriken system. I hadn't used it before and it was surprisingly... unintuitive. For one, it's not really compatible with Unity's 2D approach to game creation: they can still be rendered behind different objects, and the emitters are still 3D shapes. You also can't simply load an image to use: you need to create a new material. It's not quite as out-of-the-box as the other systems in Unity, but it's a robust system once its little quirks are understood.

Next week, I want to work on a mechanic to let the player swap between party members, and heal them. At that point, I'd consider the game ready for a proper playtest.

I really want to publish this game, but I'm going to need help. I've decided to work on a 'vertical slice': a fully finished level, so I can start pitching the game to publishers. If my planning's correct, that should be at the end of August. I started this journey almost four months ago, so having a vertical slice after six months would not be a bad result at all. Let's see if the violin girl can make it on the big stage.