ribbybibby / grimm-journey Goto Github PK

The spawn mechanism doesn't seem to work in the submitted LD build. I believe this is because the spawn point objects weren't linked to the spawn controller in most of the levels.

I've fixed this in the first level and it seems to do the trick but I have to do all the existing levels and also have a look at any possible improvements in the spawn code.

We have a lot of scripts now, some of them up to 300+ lines long. I need to go through and identify any simple refactoring we could do, remove redundant logging and most importantly, comment everything so it makes sense further down the line.

Has the time come for us to introduce some HUD into the game?

• We are now topping up BBW's health with a proto-lifesteal mechanic; maybe we should add a health bar to communicate this to the player?
• We now have a cooldown on some of BBW's attacks, maybe we should add HUD cues to communicate this?

I think a cluttered HUD would detract from the fairly stripped back aesthetic of our game, so we should tread lightly. Also this will likely take ages, so it is more of a wishlist item at this point.

I swear I can only kill cats with the Huff n Puff attack. Need to investigate that.

I broke the main camera by changing the prefab for later levels to use the narration manager. I will need to make a new main camera prefab specifically for level 0 (the intro level). The code is already written so this should go quick (CameraPan, MenuClick scripts).

Hey guys, I thought I'd mention this before I spent anymore time on it. I mentioned to Rob1 a while ago that I was planning on making a project page, which would be a basic web page with GJ stuff on it.

I made a basic framework tonight (sans art assets and new CSS) with the following tabs - About / Media / Play / Contact.

The About section will explain the game and what it is (I currently use Laura's blog post she made on the Ludum Dare blog but we can easily change it if need be).

The Media section will be used to show off screenshots (currently three) and videos, videos of people playing etc.

Play will have a download link to a solid beta once I get off my arse and finish adding the narration -.-

Contact can have our deets (links to our blogs,sites etc) if you guys want. We can even have a little paragraph each to talk about who we are and what our interests are in terms of the project etc.

I think it's important that we have one solid place to show people our stuff. Submitting to Leftfield required me to hastily make a page to link them as at the moment GJ is all grape vined through blogs and links and repos. Which works, but people are lazy yo! Hopefully this will be a better solution and rather than try and explain to people we can just show em a link and BAM they know what GJ is about :)

I havn't made anything live yet since I wanted your feedbacks but if you guys want this I can host it on my site/domain for now? It would probably be a link like tinyflame.co.uk/GrimmJourney?

Any feedbacks, please give me a shout :D

Derived from our play test session - Moon is in front of player 2

For player two (and in some cases player 1) certain level assets are in front of the player. This should be an easy fix by changing Z-axis values.

According to the Ludum site that provided the music for our game:

The music is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons ‘NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International‘ license. That means you’re free to do whatever, as long as give credit, and what you make is free (i.e. non commercial).

Laura, the SFX we use, could you list where you got them from to make sure we arn't stepping on any toes? Thanks :)

We need to create an ending for people who complete the game. Here are some ideas I have brainstormed; it would be great if you guys could give some feedback and we could come up with something everyone likes.

1. Bleak ending - real-life
   BBW and LRRH escape the shadow world as friends, only for a real-life woodcutter to slay BBW, mistaking him for LRRH's attacker. LRRH is heartbroken.

2. Happy ending - real-life
   BBW and LRRH escape the shadow world as friends, and join hands as they stroll off into the sunset on the lookout for a new adventure - leaving their old world behind.

3. Shadow Lords
   BBW and LRRH do not escape the shadow world, but they use the binding magic they are linked together by to take control of the shadow world, and rule it together.

4. Bleak Shadow Lord
   As 3) but BBW and LRRH are consumed by the magic binding them and push each other from the top of the beanstalk in battle, both dying in the process.

Art style changes from shadow puppets to a more real-life/colourful appearance with real-life endings. Use still panels, comic-book style, with spoken narration - this will remove the need for many animation assets (possibly all if Unity handles transitions - haven't played about with it enough to know).

The Cat prefab is not in the Enemy layer, this means it will apply damage to any Enemy it hits. This means two or three Cats can clear the way for the players.

We had a lot of complaints about the controls in the game. We should double check that the Pad controls work, primarily for PC, because Leftfield runs the games on PC.

Passing this to RDJ because he implemented the pad stuff. After that, as a stretch, I can try and add Mac/Linux functionality.

Rob1's idea and I think it's a good one. Adding camera panning will allow us to make bigger levels and this would make it easier to follow Laura's level designs as we won't be limited.

A few things we can do and need to keep in mind if we do this are:
Dealing with characters off screen
Possibly adding in parallax effect at later stage to make things looks sexier

As Ludum Dare is over we no longer need to stick to the 'All on one screen' theme as previously required.

Rob1 said he'd try and look into this as time permits.

If a character hits a pickup and then sits there, they will continue to switch every time it respawns. We shouldn't bring the pickup back until a character has moved off that spot.

A number of Laura's level designs use moving platforms. We didn't have time to implement these for LD31, but we should try and get them in for Leftfield.

I had a go at doing this before Xmas but found that the level load-in screwed with the way I was translating the objects. Will have to come back to it once the higher priority stuff is knocked on the head.

The Huff n Puff attack travels as fast as BBW does. This means you can run alongside the cloud if you hit it on the move.

We should make the attack a bit faster.

We have to replace the character swaps on some of the levels. As some of them may be old and results in mass LRRH spawnage everywhere :D

Witches zoom around the map like they're on drugs. Need to slow dem witches down.

Because I'm a potato, I imported the audio and left them as 3D sounds, this is why they sound different on all levels (as where the soundmanager object is placed, matters). Just logging this so I remember to change all narration sounds to 2D in the Inspector.

After doing this I'll have to mess with the volume control float in Soundmanager as 1.0F was so loud it scared the bejesus out of me.

Gotta take out the name. Art was out-sourced to a third party :)

While playing the latest build, I was wondering whether at some point we should have a little comic-book style animation to open the game (much like the end one we're planning).

I'm thinking a series of comic-book panels following the existing rhyming narrative; this (and the narrative) would play after the 'press any key' but before the game itself, and can be skipped by the player.

Thoughts?

I think the consensus of the feedback we received on the LD site was that the game was 'confusing'. I think we could help this by adding small visual cues.

For instance:

• Add an arrow above the victory light that either persists for the whole level or disappears after a set amount of time
• Add an up-arrow or a jumping symbol above the BBW when his jumping ability is active, or perhaps his asset could 'glow' a bit?

The timer when transitioning between levels (the level collapsing and the new one dropping down) takes to long. Around ~2 seconds to long. Need to change the timer.

Our Assets folder has gotten out of hand. We need to sort everything into a folder structure that is logical and easy to navigate.

LRRH's double jump is more effective if you spam the jump key in quick succession, rather than spacing it out. This is because the force applied with each key press is the same, but the force acting on the object decreases the longer she is in the air and subject to gravity.

I think with a double jump mechanic, both jumps should result in more or less the same vertical distance gained.

I have a solution for this which I have tested in a prototype build where I effectively cut all physics acting on the object at the start of the second jump, so it is performed as if it was done from standing.

When running into a swap character orb, our keyboard controls swap perfectly along with the characters. This is because we hardcoded the keyboard controls.

However as I am using the Input manager for pads the keys stay the same. So if BBW is player 1 on a pad, and they run into an orb, they will swap positions with LRRH. LRRH's controls will change, but the BBW will still have pad control. This means the character swap is more like a teleport now.

I have looked at how to get my hands on the input manager code wise but according to google and this post here: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/21083/how-do-you-get-the-button-names-assigned-to-an-axi.html it is impossible to do currently :/

I'll have to tinker about and see how we can fix this with a code work around.

Add in missing level assets, at the moment the dog statue is missing. Along with the vines for the vine levels. Due to time constraints I used tree's that swoop in at the sides, these need to be replaces on the required levels.

After a character swap, if player 2 is the BBW. They can't atack using the UOP keys.

Derived from our play test session - Narration tied to controller after character switch.

After the character switches to a different one the narration for the previous character still seems to play. Need to investigate this and fix it, Will probably do this once the narration is in place and we can test more extensively.

We don't have any specific assets for platforms; we're using standard quads/cubes. If possible we should get some assets for these.

Rob1 and I thought of a neat idea. We think that as the players are playing through a fairy tale it would be good to have a basic one line narration at the start of each level.

It won't be super long or detailed but would kind of roughly guide the player through the journey they take. For example:

"She made her way through the forest..."
"A beanstalk emerged from the castle..."

The right-bound and left-bound colliders that we use to direct AI around the levels are regular colliders, rather than triggers. This means that they physically interact with objects that collide with them. We should change them to triggers, which is a much smarter way of doing it.

This will require:

• Attach 'Right bound/Left bound' triggers to platforms or objects
• Change 'bound' sections of the AI code to OnTriggerEnter2D, rather than OnCollisionEnter2D

Spamming HnP is really overpowered! We should add a cooldown to make it less imba.

We didn't have time to add many of the planned levels to the game. We should add more!

By a lucky coincidence, the first track 'creepy woods' features a horn sound that coincides with the darkness coming on screen. This sounds awesome. We should rip that horn sound from the audio track and tie it to the darkness appearing on other levels.

Sometimes when cutting it close and you finish the level, you can still loose if one of your characters die. This may be because the level transition takes a while to trigger.

A way to fix this would be to make both characters invulnerable on victory. We shouldn't need to reset this as the next level is a separate scene. Maybe just to be safe on start set invuln to false.

The enemy drop-down mechanic, while quite complicated code-wise, is a really unnecessary feature that does more to hurt the gameplay than help it. What I think might be better would be a patrolling mechanic where enemies stick to the platforms they spawn on.

Initial thoughts (after discussion):

1. Maybe only allow troll to drop down and have the woodsmen stick to their platforms? Trolls could start at the top of the map and make their way down.
2. All we'd have to do code-wise for the patrolling is swap the left/right bound triggers on the platforms and raise them up a bit

Someone accused our platforming of being 'too floaty' which I think is a fair criticism. I also think our characters feel too mobile in the air. LRRH is so agile that she can easily traverse the platforms and get to the victory point without being bothered by the enemies.

We should try limiting x-axis movement in the air to remedy this.

Sometimes, the right hand side tree will go flying off into some strange direction. Maybe a character collides with it? Need to investigate.

At the moment, when you lose you are brought back to the main menu kind of awkwardly. We should implement a defeat screen of some sort.

To complete a level only requires that one out of the two characters reach the victory point. To stop LRRH rushing ahead and completing the level, we should require that both characters are in contact with the victory point to advance the game.

This will be simple enough to set up.

An issue that we noticed almost as soon as the submission build was done: BBW's jump is too short, making it tough to reach platforms. I need to increase the force of his jump by a bit.

The enemies change direction when they hit the left or right limit of the level. This is done using a collider/trigger on each side called left or right bound. When the enemy hits either of these, it knows to turn around.

If we were to add these left/right bounds to the edge of platforms and obstacles in the levels we could avoid enemies getting stuck, make the enemies seem smarter, and exert more control over our unruly UI code.

BBW's Bite and Claw attacks, when playing, don't seem that different. Do we really need two close-range melee attacks?

Menu logic doesn't work with pad even though I am pretty sure I set it up right with the new UI stuff as far as I can tell. Maybe it just hates me?

Will double check the inspector settings and get to fixing this.

We use the Creepy Forest music for all our levels. We have two extra tracks for the Castle and the other one that slips my mind at this time. We should play these in the appropriate places.

The spawn system now works as intended... although "works" might be a relative term. The rules for spawning set out in the design no longer make sense in the context of what the game has become. Using the player's position to generate enemies is overkill when the levels are so small and it isn't clear to the player what is going on spawn wise.

I suggest that we have enemy specific spawn points so we can better dictate the challenges the player will face at each point in the level. In order to prevent mobs of enemies developing, spawn points should also be aware of how many enemies are alive in the level.

Artist suggested that when the defeat screen comes up, the text 'The End' fades in and then fades out. After this the line "Is this where our journey ends?" fades in. Along with two buttons Retry or Quit to main menu.

I'm fairly sure the H'n'P attack does no damage. Need to look into why this is and fix it.

All the lore text makes the tiny help menu looks really crowded and difficult to read.

We could move the lore to a pre-mainmenu splash screen. It'll inform players about whats up rather than just have them see the main menu and start the game. Will ease them into the main game this way and they'll know what its about.

This will also clear up some room to list the pad controls.

BBW's attacks only trigger when one of the directional keys is held down. This makes the controls feel a bit awkward, which has been noted on our LD reviews. We should try removing this restriction and see how it feels.