Hey! Welcome to yet another devlog!
A lot of the work done this week (which wasn't that much for reasons below) was done away from view, since implementing pausing has led to needing lots and lots of bug fixes (so many..). Let's go over them!
Pausing Progress
Some interface changes had to be made to the options menu so that pausing could work with the game. Specifically three new buttons needed to be added for resuming, restarting and leaving a level. This caused the column of buttons on the left to become so numerous with buttons that I ended up just removing the credits option from the Pause menu to free up space.
It's not catching on fire anymore!
The biggest headache, however, was the character customization screen. The thing about this screen is that for "simplicity"'s sake, it creates a clone of the player which is sent a message that prevents it from moving, rotating and a couple other settings. However, merely having two player objects in the same level already breaks a lot, but now there are a lot of other weird precautions that need to be taken. One example is that the player will now immediately start with their sword without needing to hit S. Because of this, there'll be some new visual flare when you start a level from now on.
To help illustrate this, here's a screenshot of the screen before this week's fixes:
..And one after:
Wrapping up..
For the past four days, I've been participating in a local game jam with some friends. I expected to work on the jam project and Parse in parallel, since we weren't planning on making a whole lot.. but I ended up working the whole time on it, lol. Thankfully, the crowd loved our game presentation, much more than usual, so I think it was a success.
This week is my last week before I finally get my first weeklong break in two months. Despite having very little time for this project, through one of my most strenuous classes I've learnt a lot more about the Unity engine, and I can even make my own basic games without any hand holding now, which is kind of insane for me, since I couldn't do that 2 months ago. While Parse will not be switching platforms (the entire game would have to be re-constructed), it is nice to have a broader knowledge of engines, personally. And it's all the more exciting that the class deviates away from tutorial videos after this break.
We shall see how much more work I can get done on 1.3 this week. Thanks for your patience :).
-Encabulated Games