Roadmap

DAY 3 (Wednesday)
- [s]Art[/s]
- [s]Sound[/s]
- [s]Tweaks to the mobs[/s]
- Setting the spawn order to a fixed order (to circumvent situations where I could have to deal with more than 1 purple at any given time)

DAY 4 (Thursday)
- [s]Implement Splash Screen[/s]
- [s]Implement Keyboard controls[/s]
- [s]Implement Result Screen[/s]
- [s]Create buttons (Quit, Retry, etc.)[/s]
- Package the build and test under various conditions


EXTRAS
- [s]Add controls panel (reminder)[/s]

Day 3 Progress

Day 3 was better than I expected...
Art
I knew I had little time and this was my one night to really get something going. After a few unfortunate attempts, I settled for a very abstract feel which I feel contributes to the athmosphere of the game. It wants to be arcade-ish and somewhat unsettling too.

Sounds
This will be a love it or hate it spot for the judges for sure, but I tried to go for low-tech (generated waves in JFXR) and yet give it some flair, especially in terms of feedbacking everything right (when cubes fall to the ground for example). Even managed to put a very eerie sound in the result screen which makes death all the more meaningful. I can see why this might turn off a lot of people, but in my opinion, this is one of the big wins of day 3!

Tweaks to the Mobs
There's been a lot of that, even a new Mob type! I wasn't too sure how to approach this item, but I knew I wanted to squeeze the fun out of the gameplay elements I had laid out and I felt I did a decent job of making them more interesting to face.

Setting the spawn order to a fixed order
Sadly, I did not really have the time to truly assess this item, and to be honest, I'm not too sure on the fixed order altogether. That being said, I need to revisit the issue to at least prevent having two purples in play at the same time, at least, in the early stages of the game (on one attempt, I had my first 4 spawns be purple, which was simply impossible).

Implement Splash Screen
A bit of a brain-dead operation I had originally planned for Day4, but actually started on Day2 (late evening). Made a simple fade in/out with more than 2 seconds on-screen as per the requirement, which is a small unknown out of the way!

Implement Keyboard Controls
Week of Awesome II prepared me well for input management, so I only had to use the Input Axis management in Unity to quickly mirror controls from Gamepad to Keyboard. Took a bit to fine-tune actual scale, but thank Unity for the "sensitivity" value!! All in all, a well spent 15 minutes!

Implement Result Screen
This one took a bit of time to implement and get right. There's a lot of hidden stuff in there, but it was part of my plan all along to create a system where there are two "endgames". I won't spoil anyone here though!

Create Buttons
Simply added buttons in both the Game and Result screen to complete the flow (retry and quit). Simple but effective: I've lost points in Week of Awesome II (and learned a valuable lesson about game-jamming) based on having no reliable means to quit the game aside from alt-f4, thus, from a UX standpoint, I felt this needed to be added asap!

UX - Controls reminder
Following the UX train of thought about quiting the game, I simply added a controls reminder on-screen as a placeholder. It is unclear whether I'll be able to have the controls show up on-screen as per my previous Week of Awesome entry, so this will most likely be the final implementation. It's really "out there", but at least it's there.

With so much of Day 4 done, I figured I might as well push my luck and try out a few things. All of the below were ideas I tried to implement and ultimately trashed:
- Moving platform (rotating, etc.) - Originally started on Day2, and ultimately trashed because it was competing with core game elements.
- Cylinder platform - Tried to make it better-looking (circular arena), but it seems that it would require a custom collider which caused issues with OnCollisionEnter triggers. By lack of time to fine-tune, shelved this.
- Spawning new platforms on platform death - Felt it could be interesting but added a lot to the scope and I didn't feel I could get this done reliably within my own personal availability.
- Multi-spawn logic - Tried it, thought it would be fun if, sometimes, instead of a single mob, 2+ would drop from the sky at relatively the same time, but it made the game very noisy design-wise and I chose to comment the feature out for now.



For Day4, I'd like to be able to:
- Reword the Result Screen visual. I liked the texture, but it just doesn't work with text.
- Add two mob variations (one of a larger Striker to force players to Jump more, and a mob with a custom AI that acts as a "striker shooter" which could really add some depth regarding positioning and target priority).
- Find a simple solution to avoid Purple overcrowding
- Package the build and test it under various conditions to insure judges are able to play it!


Day3 Video: