I continued to work on combat this week, but shifted from core mechanics to “game feel.” After adding particle effects and sound effects, combat is much more satisfying. The game is getting closer to being fun. 🙂
New Videos
New GIFs
This Week’s Achievements
- Combat particle effects. I’ve never worked with particle effects. There’s a learning curve with Unity’s particle effects system, but being able to change settings in the editor and see the effect in real-time helped immensely. Also, I accelerated by learning my buying a particle effect package in the Unity asset store and studying how it worked. I created a few particle effects for when an actor/object is hit with a weapon. The target’s physical material determines the particle effect. For example, when a rat is hit it will spray blood, while a skeleton archer will spray bones and bone fragments. Additionally, the size and number of particles vary based on the amount of damage inflicted.
- Improved combat sound effects. I was annoyed with the combat sound effects I chose. They were so quiet and boring. I was going to have to either find better assets, increase the volumes of the assets I had, or use the Unity audio mixer to get better sound. I was also running into an issue where the direction the sound was coming from was wrong. But, that issue ended up being a blessing in disguise because it made me realize why I was having low volume issues: the audio listener was attached to the main camera, which was way up above the player. When I attached the listener to the player, all the volume issues went away (though I haven’t fixed the directional issue yet).
- Added hooks for additional sound effects, including dying, taking an object, ambient sound, footsteps, and walking on different types of terrain. Footsteps are challenging. I lowered the volume and slightly randomized the pitch of each step to make them less prominent and repetitive.
- Right-clicking does something. Right-clicking on an object will display the Inspect Panel for that object. I should’ve done this a long time ago, but it was overlooked because the original target platform was mobile rather than PC.
- Mapping the number keys to hotbar slots. Another basic feature I overlooked – allowing items in the hotbar to be used by pressing the corresponding number key.
- Added probabilities to triggered game events. For example, when a pile of bones is destroyed, there’s a 50% chance that a ghost will spawn. This provides some unpredictability and more player choice.
- Framework for player notifications in the Inspect Panel. When a player inspects an object, in addition to the description of the object, I want to communicate important gameplay information. For example, if the player inspects an object that is far away, I want to inform players that they need to be standing next to the object to interact with it. There’s now a framework for collecting notifications from various sources and prominently displaying them on the Inspect Panel.
- Fixed many combat bugs. There were a surprising number of things that didn’t work or caused crashes. The majority of these bugs were from the last major refactoring.
Next Week’s Goals
Next week, I’ll continue working on “game feel” and small refinements that go a long way. I’m way off track on the milestone schedule, but I feel closer to being done than I think I would have had I stuck with the planned milestones. The additional content I was previously working on wasn’t making the game any better because the core loop was lacking.
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