Hello!! Welcome back to the development blog of Morphy. Sorry for not posting an update last week. I really wanted to, but something happened which didn't let me write a blog last week. You can read about it towards the end of this post. So, another three weeks have passed and I am here to show you more progress made towards this project. In this week's blog I will show you the main mechanic of the game, the placement of platforms by the player and also the implementation of the preparation phase and its importance in the game.
Platform Placement Mechanic
The main mechanic of this project is for the player to be able to place the platforms into the Level before he can play it. So I wanted to get that out of the way so I began working towards that. Honestly, I thought this is going to be really hard and I might have to end up asking someone's help for this, but I managed to do it very easily and you can see it working below.
All I did was make all the platforms as prefabs and gave each type of platform an ID. And then instantiated the platform based on the platform ID. I also made a small button next to each platform that's placed by the player so that he can edit the level if he feels he has placed the wrong platform.
Preparation Phase
I did not have the preparation phase initially included in the game. I came up with this recently because I realized that the game can be broken without one. The preparation phase occurs at the start of the level and is when the player can place the platforms from his inventory. Programming the preparation phase was very easy as I only had to add a boolean to the Game Manager which is being checked every time the player tries to place a platform. If the boolean is false, the player cannot place the platform.
I also added a button on the top-right which the player clicks to switch from the preparation phase to the playing phase and vice-versa. But every time the player clicks the button to come into the preparation phase, the game takes the player back to the starting position to avoid the player from breaking the game.
A Small Setback
Last week, for some reason my laptop, on which I had my whole project crashed and I don't know why it wouldn't switch on. After contacting Asus, they were very prompt in picking it up, repairing it and sending it back to me within a week. Luckily I had everything backed up on GitHub and I continued work on my PC without losing any data and progress from the project.
That's it from the last three weeks. I have my final presentation coming up soon and I think I have a lot to showcase to my mentors and peers. I can't wait to show it to them. In the next post, I shall tell you about the feedback I received from my peers and mentors along with the implementation of the inventory system and character animations. This post will be up on 6th April 2019.
Until then, adios.