Journal Entry #3

Date: 15.04.2024

Activity:

- Added some new audio and made a small modification of the behavior of pushable boxes on moving platforms.

- Created start and end cutscenes, and camera movement to show when doors are being opened.

- Added a start menu.

Notes:

My first task was to figure out why the performance of the game was dropping at certain points, however, the performance drops were not present in the built game, so there must've been some issue with running the game in the editor that didn't affect the finished game.

Next, I worked on fixing the problem where a box would stick to the sides of a platform when pushed off. I realized that this only happens when the box is pushed off in the direction of the movement of the platform, so it was basically being pushed along by the platform. I decided to leave this behavior as is and only to increase the gravity on the box so it drops faster.

While putting together the audio for the cutscenes, I decided to go back and add some sounds to the bouncing and the checkpoints to juice up the experience.

I struggled a bit with understanding how the timelines work. I experimented with using activation tracks to control when different objects do something, until I realized that I could just use signals. One thing that I didn't manage to figure out was how to make the character move with the timeline. Whenever I would try, the sprite would just start jumping around randomly. I tried to figure out what was causing this strange behavior, but at the end, I decided that having Ellen move wasn't crucial to the cutscenes so I left that out. Another thing I spent some time experimenting with was how to make the platform start moving when the barrier is opened. For some reason, no collision was being detected between the two and I couldn't figure out why that was happening. At the end, I used tweening to move the barrier and triggered the platform movement once that was completed.

Once I added the Start menu, I introduced some issues in the timelines since I was calling the ScreenFader, and that is an object that persists from the Start menu so it wasn't able to be called from the signal. So I created a ScreenFaderController that called the methods from the Screen Fader which only exists in the level. I also had a small issue with not being able to click the buttons in the options menu, but it turned out that I had just deleted the EventSystem gameobject while I was removing the UI elements, which were not necessary for my game, so creating it again fixed that.

Duration:  6 hours

Credit for audio used:

Boing by SimbertoB -- https://freesound.org/s/186598/ -- License: Creative Commons 0  

Ice Shimmer.wav by Corruptinator -- https://freesound.org/s/705725/ -- License: Attribution 4.0  

Generic Spaceship Alarm 02.wav by Tim_Verberne -- https://freesound.org/s/514079/ -- License: Creative Commons 0  

Big Structure Collision Heard from Inside by Osvoldon -- https://freesound.org/s/653294/ -- License: Creative Commons 0  

wrench 02.wav by Anthousai -- https://freesound.org/s/399011/ -- License: Creative Commons 0  

Alien Ship Takeoff by xilith.com -- https://freesound.org/s/498344/ -- License: Creative Commons 0