Dev Diary - 23 Nov

23 NOV 2020

Project Violet

One thing I was a little disappointed by was that no matter how good I get the rest of the game running; my main menu still looks like a placeholder. While cosmetic isn’t really the point of this milestone, I wanted to make sure I didn’t just leave a solid black menu with a single button. Instead, I spent some time trying to transition the main menu into the intro cinematic seamlessly to give it more of a polished feel. It isn’t finished yet, but based on how well it’s working I think I really like it.

24 NOV 2020

Project Violet

I managed to get the intro how I like it. When you press play, the UI all fades out and disables which allows the player to just watch the intended intro. Once the intro completes, it moves onto the game on its own. This was actually a lot easier once I discovered events via animations. I’d never heard of that before, but it saved me a lot of time and I’ll definitely be using it in the future.

25 NOV 2020

Ship Game

This milestone is going to be dedicated to learning how to do a few more basic concepts like two player mode, saving, and adjustable menus. I’m sticking with this project as a way of experimenting outside of Project Violet because the game doesn’t need many things like saving and multiplayer, but I still want to know how to do it for future projects. Today I mostly was able to get the main menu shell up and running along with some preliminary double-cameras.

26 NOV 2020

Ship Game

All of today was spent getting two player to work. The menu can be used to tell the game if it’s one player or two player, and when it is, it adjusts the cameras to fit accordingly. Each player has its own score/health, and there is a death screen if one player dies before another. I was also able to get a simple radar system working for each player, once again resizing and aligning based on multiplayer choices.

27 NOV 2020

Ship Game

Racing to finish the milestone, I put quite a few hours into this one. I finally got saving to work, both for high scores and for menu options, and was able to have the high score adjust based on new input and then save it. Audio was much, much easier than I had made it in Project Violet, as I’d never even heard of the volume mixer before. Whoops. But, overall I’m quite pleased. I was able to learn multiplayer, cameras, saving, and high scores which was quite the headache but I’m very glad I took the time to learn them.