Devlog #1 - Of Levels & Cutscenes

I was aware progress with this game hadn't exactly been swift... But realising 4 months had gone by was quite the shock.

But putting it into perspective, I'd estimate it's involved about 80 hours of total dev time since the last build was uploaded (at roughly 5 hours per week), equating to about 2 weeks of full time effort...  That put my mind at ease, and I'm actually pretty happy with what I've been able to achieve.

LEVELS

This build adds levels 2 and 3, one of which adds a new lure to allow the player to "freeze" the fish, creating a stepping stone to allow the player to access areas they otherwise couldn't. 

The biggest time sink has been fine tuning the game mechanics, and refactoring large chunks of code that worked when there was only one level to consider. Now the level logic is actually quite straight forward; define what happens what the level starts (which I've used to outline a brief description of the level), and handle any level bespoke logic, such as if the fish is "caught". 

I'd also used singletons quite a bit throughout the codebase, as this was something I'd seen recommended when watching Unity tutorial videos, and while they do work well for what I needed, I don't remember any of the tutorials warning against a vital issue; static variables persist across scenes. This led to a slew of issues as moving onto a new scene would be trying to reference destroyed game objects. The remedy is fairly straightforward, just clear down all the singletons before loading the new scene and make sure nothing tries to "get" them until the new scene is loaded.

CUTSCENES

It was strange, for something that I'm so used to seeing in games, when it came to actually structuring a cutscene and determining what should be in it... I felt lost. I ended up making my own cutscene handler so I could build the cutscene as a set of "step by step instructions". 

I'm fairly happy with how this works, but I can't help but feel there must be better ways of accomplishing something so common. 

Some things I did also ended up removing because they just didn't "feel right", for example, I had the view move from place to place to show the player various things in the level... But as it's a first person game, it felt like the player was flying around in a way that didn't make sense... If they have that ability, why are they ambling along the floor when the player gets control...

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

I have the concepts for levels 4, 5 and 6 in mind, it's just a case of how to structure the level to make best use of those ideas. In the "80 hours" of dev work for this build, it includes work I've been doing for those levels too, which does put my mind more at ease about how long it's take to get to this point. 

I also think between now and the next version, it'll be vital to do something in the way of balancing and making the game... Faster? Or smoother... While I do want the game to be fairly serene and low energy... I think a target time of 30 seconds to a minute for each level should be what I'm aiming for and the second level definitely takes long than that.

I'm also thinking of doing away with a "vision cone" for the player fish, as having to wait for it to turn around before you can throw next lure is one of the main factors that prolongs level length.