capstonereports

[capstonereports]

Final Reflection

It's been quite the ride! Thanks for sticking with me through it all. :)

I hope you all enjoyed seeing my progress as much as I enjoyed making it, and I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavours! Bye~ <3

(The song playing in the background is "Thank you for your patience" from the FNAF 6 Soundtrack ;P)

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Week 14

Week 14 Breakdown

Coded in a player light to help navigate the map and to act as part of the main time-based mechanic

Coded in the first of the player interactions in the official project- box breaking and item pickups! 

The player could now interact with a box, have it disappear or “break”, and gain a randomized amount of fuel for their light

Coded in a game over where, once the player runs out of fuel, the light goes out and the player dies (still needed to code in the actual Game Over screen though, I was just using a placeholder to make sure the code worked correctly)

Fixed bugs as I came across them:

Torches were spawning on doors and blocking the way 

Some items were missing colliders

The boxes the player could break would have misaligned hit boxes when generated in facilities but not in the testing rooms (this was the hardest to figure out but I fixed it!)

Worked on filming and editing THE MEGA UPDATE and, of course, writing all of this out and editing down/compiling all of the behind the scenes footage I had gathered to post here :)   

Quick pic of me editing :)

I wanted to post some more footage of the game, but I've still got a ton to go through and edit. I'll be sure to post it when I'm done though! For now, take this little bit of me testing out the player lighting (in a fully randomized facility!!! How cool is that!?!?!):

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Week 12-13

Week 12 Breakdown

Started to really panic- I got another job because I really needed it but now I had less time and a lot of work still left to do

Spent all my time focusing on the facility generation

Learned how to make custom rooms and connect them to the rest of a randomly generated map using pathfinding corridors (probably my favorite thing I did that week)

Wrote the spawn rules for the door marker which is supposed to tell the generator where to delete walls and place doors when the facility first generates so the corridors and rooms are properly connected

More door troubles

Door markers would spawn in the correct place, and the actually door asset would spawn in the correct place, but it would also leave a wall blocking the door so the player couldn’t enter, spawn a second door at a different rotation, and delete the floor beneath the door. So. That was a problem.

Spent most of the rest of the week fixing that, fixing a problem with the windows spawning, and making sure the character movement worked now that the hallways were clear   

Week 13 Breakdown 

Coding in the basic lighting- I fixed the problem I was having with the lighting earlier and was able to make it completely dark, and I got the torches that would randomly spawn around the map to emit a soft light that could cast shadows

Added ceiling to the randomly generating rooms and corridors

Began setting up the foundational code that I needed in Playmaker to allow for coding basic character interactions (picking up items, reading notes, opening doors, etc)

Started to get really worried about my progress and had a meeting with my professor where I decided to pivot

Instead of having an enemy chase the player around the map that they would have to hide from, the main enemy is instead the amount of time you have (a mechanic which will be shown in my deliverable) and other elements would be added later in future levels to increase the difficulty (which will be detailed in my design document)

Updated design document to reflect the change

A closer look at the door problem:

The lighter colored arrows in the tiles at the beginning of the video are pointing to where the doors should be spawning, but as you can see, when everything gets generated, they weren't spawning on the walls properly and deleting the floors, as I described before.

[capstonereports]

Week 10-11

Week 10 Breakdown 

Rewrote the door code to work the way it was supposed to with the iron bars- it would work in the sample rooms but not in the facility >:(

Began work on using the blueprints/field set-ups I made for the random room generation to randomly generate an entire facility

Managed to get it to spawn the corridors and rooms properly but there were a few bugs here and there

The biggest bug was that the rooms would sometimes overlap each other when they spawned in, so I spent a bit fixing that 

Week 11 Breakdown

Moved my character movement code into the official project (I had several iterations of it for different bits of code just in case one bit of code interacted poorly with another)

Tested out movement in the generating facilities and quickly realized a few problems:

None of the walls or floor had colliders so my player would just clip right through them (super easy fix, just needed to go through add one to everything)  

Because I was using the general room randomization rulest I had made for both the general rooms AND the corridors, pillar were spawning in the corridors and blocking the way

Started to code a new ruleset for the corridors specifically and this is where Tragedy struck

When I was coding the ruleset, I must have clicked or not clicked something because I ended up overwriting all the code I had done for the general room randomization

Spent the rest of the week fixing that afterwards

A small bit of me trying to get the iron bar doors to spawn correctly, but it only sort-of working in facility generations:

[capstonereports]

Week 8-9

Week 8 Breakdown

Finished up writing the spawn rules for the items that would spawn in the general rooms

Worked on figuring out the lighting- ran into a bit of an issue with it not getting as dark as I wanted and ended up moving on to working with PGG more

Tried to move onto making facilities spawn and got part-way through before realizing that the walls in the PSX asset pack were too thin to generate nicely

Searched for a different modular asset pack to use that had thicker walls, and ended up picking out the Free Modular Low Poly Dungeon Pack by RGS_Dev on Itch.io

Started to replace all the PSX models I used for the spawn rules in PGG with the new Dungeon Pack assets

Week 9 Breakdown

Edited my design document to work better with the new asset pack I was using, reimagining some of the story and mechanics

Finished replacing the models in PGG with the new assets

Went back to the basic room spawning ruleset to set up the door markers that would tell the plugin to spawn a door in a select space, but couldn’t get the wooden doors to spawn correctly

Decided to pivot away from using the doors and instead grabbed a different asset from the dungeon pack (it looks like iron bars) and use that in place of the wooden door

The bars filled the space correctly where the wooden doors wouldn’t, but I couldn’t get it to delete the wall it was supposed to replace, so I ended up using an improvised solution that needed to be recoded later in Week 10

For a few of the new assets I had to recode the spawn rules entirely- one of the tougher ones to do were the walls. So, here's a little process video of me trying to get the new walls to spawn correctly and randomize themselves:

[capstonereports]

THE MEGA UPDATE (Weeks 4-14)

(I had to split it in three because the video was too big for Tumblr and too long for YouTube >:P)

EDIT: Nearly forgot to mention!!! All the music in the videos I got from the Free Music Archive- they're all from the "Gamer Soundtrack: Beginnings" album by HoliznaCC0.

They've got a ton of great music available to use for free and I highly recommend checking them out! (HoliznaCC0 - Free Music Archive)

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Week 6-7

Week 6 Breakdown

Bit of a slower week

Figuring out how to code enemy AI using Playmaker and NavMeshes 

Learning more of the layout for both Playmaker and Unity

Playing around more in the sample level from the PSX pack using practice code

Week 7 Breakdown

Watched the introductory tutorials for PGG that FImpossible Creations has available

Did some practice with the plugin using the tutorials

Started using the PGG plugin with the assets from the PSX pack

Took a while to get somewhat of a grasp on it, but felt confident enough at the end of these two weeks to move on to coding the spawn rules I’d use in my final deliverable

Footage of me figuring out how to use a NavMesh to get an enemy to follow the player (obviously there were some kinks to work out):

[capstonereports]

Week 4-5

Week 4 Breakdown

Searched for a variety of tutorials, trying to learn more about Unity and how difficult some of the mechanics I had planned would be to code 

Worked on my design document, tried to get down a basic outline based on my research paper and the tutorials I found

Recoded my basic character and camera movements using Playmaker instead of C# script

Tested out some other small things using Playmaker to practice 

Looked for a pack of assets to use as placeholders on the Unity asset store and Itch.io before settling on the PSX Architecture Pack by Comp-3 Interactive

Week 5 Breakdown

Worked more on my design document

Decided to try to create procedurally generated maps, inspired by both my research and other indie horror titles

Initially tried to code it in C# script before deciding to go with something more visual like Playmaker and picked up the Procedural Generation Grid (PGG) plugin by FImpossible Creations

Looked the plugin over a bit, trying to learn the layout, and also tested out some other code for interactions in the sample project from the PSX pack

Here's a bit of footage from Week 4 of me trying to figure out character and camera movement using Playmaker:

[capstonereports]

Hi! I'm not dead!

I've been hard at work on my capstone trying to make sure my deliverable is playable, and at least somewhat up to my standards, and I can't wait to share my progress with you! There's still a bit of coding to be done, but I'll be doing a mass Progress Update video tomorrow to go through what I've been doing week by week as well as posting some behind the scenes footage and notes. Stay tuned! :D

Here's a little sneak peek of me working on the random level generation:

[capstonereports]

I finally got this working, this took way too long 😭

But hello everyone! It's wonderful to meet you, and I wish you all luck with your projects :D