Week 10

This week we drew in further outside opinion and further refined the game by adding polished UI elements and modifying some of our interactions.

Par for the Course

This week we introduced something that we had been discussing for a few weeks now, the par system. With this system, each level would have an ideal number of deaths which the player would aim to beat the level in. This bar was represented using outlined tick marks. The players deaths were then shown by filling in the tick marks. At this point in development, the par is nothing more than a suggestion however and you are still able to beat the level by dying more times than displayed by the par.

UI

I then implemented a more symbolic UI to display the amount of stamina the play has left. Sandy came up with this great idea to use a waning moon because moth’s use the moon’s light for navigation. He then designs a beautiful sprite set which I imported into unity and mapped to the player’s stamina value.

Refinements

Taking a suggestion given to use last week regarding using the in-game zapper lanterns to more naturally light the level, I further refined the lighting. Lighting is hard and lighting a dark black and white environment is even hard, but I was able to make the map more striking by adding more lights throughout the level and by making objects that would natural omit light have individual point lights. I also added constraints to the arms so that they would only reach to around halfway across the hallway. This prevents the player from seeing the stubbed ends of the arms and maintains the illusion of mystery around their origin. I also switched up the way respawning works so that the player clicks to respawn instead of waiting for a respawn timer. His puts the control back in the hands of the user as the timer could get tedious if the player wants to retry right away or have a longer break.