Date: 23.5.2023

Activity:

• Finished Project C (…or did we…?)

Notes: So, a lot has happened since the last devlog. We named out protagonist. Her name’s Mia. We also finally settled on a name for the game - Recall. It’s obviously about Mia’s ability to recall her spear but we later gave it a deeper meaning.

Remember how I complained about the animator being very messy with so many animations a couple devlogs back? Yeah well, I redid all of that. Took me I think 2.5 hours. But I think it’s a lot better now. Before what I did, was that I split the animator into two parts - with spear and no spear and then added transitions between them. The problem was the two halves were internally very similar so when I wanted to add a new animation, I would basically have to do it twice.

The way the new animator works is that each animator state represents both the animation with spear and the animation with no spear. I used unity’s blend trees for that. I know they aren’t really made for this but it works fine, I just had to change the hasSpear parameter from bool to float. This new system gives me less control about transitioning between states with spear and no spear but it’s just so much easier to work with. Also, in some states, instead of using a blend tree, I used a substate machine. I discovered that you can make a transition from a substate machine and to a substate machine and it then goes into its entry/exit node where the substate machine can handle it itself. I found no mention of this in unity’s docs by the way. I only discovered this later, maybe I could have made all states like this but now only some states use it - for example the Throw state which decides if it should play the ground throw, jump throw or fall throw animation (yes, we have 3 different throw animations).
By the way, the final player animation count is 24.

Since most of the mechanics were already done, I mostly just did bug-fixing (and lemme tell you, there was a looot of work). Some notable bugs were that when the player was recalling the spear, it would sometimes push them a little back. I knew about this for a while but I kinda liked it so I left it. Later tho, I discovered that if the player was standing against a wall and they recalled the spear, it could push them through a wall and out of bounds. I first fixed that by disabling the spears collider when recalling but later I ran into a similar issue of pushing enemies out of bounds. I guess the root of the problem is that the composite collider was set to edges only and so it was very easy to clip through it so I changed it to polygons and now and haven’t clipped through a wall since so I guess it’s fine now. Just in case it happened again, I added a kill plane that kills the player if they fall below the level.

Another noteworthy bug was that the player would sometimes freeze, unable to move. I have a system where the player’s movement can be turned off with a public Freeze() method. I mostly just call that from some animations. It basically lets me pick during which animations the player can and can’t move. I originally made it for the attack animation which freezes the player at the start and unfreezes them at the end. It works surprisingly well but obviously it had to cause issues at some point. The problem was recalling. I can’t call the freeze/unfreeze through the animation because the animation just has one frame that it loops over and over. The way I did it was that I called freeze OnButtonDown and unfreeze OnButtonUp. This seemed to have worked just fine but then I discovered that the player could just unfreeze whenever they wanted. When trying to fix it, I would usually end up freezing the player for good without a way unfreeze. Took me a while to figure it out but I think it works now.

Then we had some issues with sounds either not playing when they should or playing when they shouldn’t. I’m honestly not sure that all of these are fixed.

I made the music for the game. I have some experience working with music but I think I suck at game music. I’m happy with the menu theme (because it doesn’t really have to be ‘game’ music). Making the main theme that plays in-game took me a while. It’s very simple, it really shouldn’t have taken so long but like I said, I suck at game music. It’s not the worst thing ever but it could have been better.

I had to justify the sad music (I am very much incapable of making happy music) so I came up with a simple story. The game is called Recall mostly because of the ability to recall the spear but it also has a second meaning - to remember. So I came up with the idea that Mia has amnesia, that’s why the game’s called Recall and why the music is sad. We added some very simple story elements but it was very last minute so don’t expect too much.

We also talked about continuing working on this game. I think I mentioned in the first devlog that in an ideal world (where each day has like 100 hours), this game would be a metroidvania. I like the idea that Mia could discover her memories and get back lost abilities. I think it’s a cool way to tie the story together with the gameplay. Maybe one day…

Invested hours:
Once again, no clue. I think it was again something around 20.