Phase 1 Late Development - October 

*Frame of Mind*

After wrapping up the RealmRiser sprint, I was so happy to finish the first phase of RecRed and set my sights on preparing for my first-ever pitch event the next month.  Bells and whistles and tidying up took priority over new features this month and I also began to flesh out the schemas for Phase 2 in depth. Stay tuned for that post! All in all, I loved every moment, blood, sweat, tears, and frustration it took to get this far. Game development is much like the Myth of Sisyphus or a very long hike, you don't feel like you're getting anywhere until you see the view. It's a shock yet you can't help but feel proud of yourself for sticking through to the end. I wanna keep running up that hill! 

*Things That Worked* 

• My mentor helped fix both issues in last month's devlog and I discovered the true power of booleans. I had always used booleans to confirm checks but not to any extent where they regulated major parts of gameplay.  The battle system in RealmRiser though rather simple in its battling mechanics itself, heavily relied on booleans to constrict/ allow movements based on turns. With this in mind, we were able to expound the purpose of booleans in RecRed to control interactions available to the player. Additionally, this concept of boolean control brought an idea. I had to replace the “CloudConsciousnessSpawner” mechanic in regard to gameplay interaction. Instead of having the player run to  X random positions, I noticed that my QA would stay stationary in one place and cycle through the lost media there, rarely ever venturing out to check out the other clouds across the stairwell.  I wanted to fix this and incentivize( or force honestly) the player to traverse the stairwell.  Enter the boolean waypoint system. I pulled one of the clouds out of the custom prefabs into the scene and instead chose to also have the traversal rely on collision. Through boolean checks - the player OTE the sphere of a cloud, a coroutine would trigger that moved the cloud to a different spawn location after X period of time and cease coroutine afterward once in range of the next spawn location until the next OTE. This then forced the player to chase the cloud across the stairs as they would need more time to look at the LostMedia and CloudControl.  QA expressed they had fun chasing the clouds across the level and approved this new idea as much better than the last. I added some flavor by instantiating three clouds at runtime, with the cloud only activating the travel if the player's interactor was in range. I reused the spawn point path in CloudConsciousnessSpawner, and played with a random number generator for two more custom paths. Additionally, line renderers showcasing the cloud-to-player path served as a directory aide. This then totally unmapped any need for the player to control any system other than what was necessary for playable gameplay. I also no longer needed to rely on pooling for the cloud system. A  late-phase success! 

• The LostMedia issues from last month were also resolved by adding an additional component to the scriptable object manipulating that component to scale correctly on the LM panel and decoupling the queue from the spawner. 

• I had been working on sound design throughout the entirety of the process but had totally forgotten any on-click sounds so I stuck those in the sound manager and viola! Phase 1 was complete. I was tired and yet so incredibly elated to see my dream into something tangible. Thanks to my QA and Mentor for providing feedback during this process! Couldnt have done it without ya! Onwards and upwards! 

*Things That Didn't  Work (Yet!)*

• I had originally anticipated using the Djikstras Algorithm but it wasn't quite the right use case, I still would like to implement this wayfinding technique when the game is scaled in conjunction with a quest system. 

Thanks for listening! 

XOXO, 

tracie