Spike's Digital Media Blog

  This week I have worked on a great many things, firstly there is some cosmetic additions to the level, which is still a little bare bones but I have at least made a start on it. in terms of texturing. I have then created a great many more assets integral to the escape the game/ escape your life feature such as the escape doors which will blend in with the level and be as hidden as possible as these endings although hinted at are meant to be a secret for the player to uncover. Most objects code wise are very similar, they all contain references to a part of UI which will appear when the character is near it and when interacted with the object will either appear/ disappear (Barriers/ Keys for doors) or there is the case with the doors which will change your level to a different one. All of them use the barrier code below with slight variation as at they're core they are all actors with a collision box and 2 states. This has lined up well for Easter as now a majority of code is done

 Today I worked on adding some more riddles to the game, I also finally added a death counter and treasure counter, I was hesitant to do so as of yet because I didn't know how to display a value from a variable, it's as simple as typing out the variable name so say I wanted to display a death count I would just type ' You died $DeathCount times this playthrough '. the treasure counter too functions very similarly also. I have to be very careful with how I structure riddles  and conditional events though as I barely understand how (if:)/ (Else:) statements work like when I tried placing a statemen within a pre existing statement. Didn't go down well. Either way I have pretty much caught up with the amount I had planned up until now so after I fully finish all the options I will need to plan more. Up until now I have had the story branch off into two majorly different direction which will probably join together at one point. One in the dungeon and then a temple area a

          These Screenshots contain all my progress for this week, I created an ammo box (The Blue Cube) which is based on the model/ code I used for the Health Item just retextured and set to change the value of ReserveAmmo Variable rather than PlayerHealth, I also created an enemy spawner (Dinosaur head icon) - it is essentially an invisible object that just places down enemies on a delay - fairly simple but is all I think I can really do with the short amount of development time remaining, especially as I'm not adding individual wave numbers, then there is the player barrier which you can purchase using points from killing Gibbies, so far I have only added the ability for a widget to appear asking if you wanmt to purchase and place the barrier but it is not yet functional - I will need to have it so it first checks if you have enough points and then subtracts however much the barrier costs as they will have differing sizes and costs, I will hopefuly work out the blueprint for th

  Today I worked on catching up to my plan from google draw in Twine, I connected and wrote text for many pages and then worked on a big encounter on one route where it is 3 separate life or death decisions for the player to make in an encounter with a horde of skeletons which inspired me to create a death counter because of all the scenarios in which you can die. I also practiced a bit more with if/ else statements when making a riddle puzzle and created a blessed/ cursed mechanic depending on whether or not the player interacts with a certain shrine on one route of the game. This is also gave me the idea to add a treasure counter and death counter at the end of the game just so the story and the player's journey is recorded. This will be very easy to do with variables.

These are backgrounds for the menus in my game, I was partly inspired by Geometric Abstraction and followed a red/ googly eye kind of aesthetic which is line with the Gibby artstyle and that was as deep asthe inspiration really went. I wanted to try something new though actually as I often just use a screenshot as the background or a cloudy horizon, which I originally intended to do for this game, I'm not sure why really, it just puts the game all together and makes it seem less bare-bones. Today, with much assistance from Josh may I add, I also managed to add an ammo counter/ system to the game which took a very long time, we also got the ammo count to display on the gun model itself in real-time, which currently is not working because the texture I assigned to the on-weapon ammo counter was a modified base material which the editor did not like me saving over. It's rather simple at the minute as there is no reserve ammo or way of relaoding which I will attempt again probably