Andrea Lalanda - Term 2

SFX I borrowed the Zoom and went to the park to record some ambient tracks and sound effects. I thought it would be tricky to record them alone but it went pretty okay. It was very windy though, so the sounds didn't turn out perfect. I recorded several types of steps (on grass, on dirt, on ground, on leaves...) and SFX for the falling apple and kicking can. Sometimes I had to stop and wait because of the train coming behind the park. For othe SFX like the spaceship and the scanner, Glenn found some good sounds. SOUNDTRACK I wanted something cheerful but not too upbeat, even a bit calm and sweet but not boring or romantic. I really like this website ( www.soundimage.org ) for ambience or background musics, since is royalty free (as long as we credit the creator, but we did in the credits). But in the end we chose some acoustic guitar tracks from the SIT Music Library. And for the "saving seed" moment I found a cool "hero" music which fits good and...

WATERMARKS (yes, again) In the first renders I got some watermarks back in 2-3 frames and when I rendered them again I always got watermarks back. So I rendered those frames with Batch Render and then it was fine, but it was a bit annoying. Luckily it only happened with that scene. TRANSPARENCY ISSUE Apparently you can't render the Transmission (for the glass helmet) so that you can see any background through the glass. You only see the reflection (which saves it a little bit) but the rest looks black, sometimes even matte. I played around a lot but I don't think it's doable unless you have the actual footage in Maya and put a Shadow Matte floor behind the glass which renders whatever background the scene has. But I couldn't load any footage in Maya, I always had to take screenshots and use the, as a background. So for some scenes I changed the Transmission under Visibility of the HDR Skydome so that is not completely dark. The problem is, some scen...

First set the Camera under Visibility in the Skydome (HDR) attributes to 0. If there are shadows that need to be render, create a surface which will cast the shadows and add a Shadow Matte material. This will only render the shadows. Then when everything is done and ready to render, make sure to delete the Camera plane so it does not appear in the final render.

I am pretty happy with my game and it was a lot of fun. Specially because we had a lot of freedom regarding idea, development, design... etc, which wasn't the case the last time I built a game for an assignment. So what is different to the initial proposal? I left the black holes out. I tried creating them first with particles (I found a great tutorial for it but it was for Unity 2018) and I couldn't quite figure out how to model and animate it to make it low poly and good looking with the rest of the game. And the level is pretty long anyway, so I think it's best. Also I got rid of the Shop (for the moment) because I don't know how to save the points between scenes so that the player can use them to purchase better weapons or assets. Is the same problem with my character's name . I wanted the player to name it, but the name wouldn't be saved for the level scene, only the Main Menu. After some people played my game and I got some feedback I changed t...

The final step was adding sound to the game. I found a very good video that implements an Audio Manager which controls almost all sounds with just one object and it is very handy. [ Video here ]. This way I didn't need to create an Audio source or Audio clips as components or variables everywhere. For the rest of sounds that don't need coding, aka the are played on awake when they're instantiated like the laser shots,  I added an Audio Source like normal. I specially love the "Game over" sound and the "Level completed" sound ;) I had a problem at some point when I wanted to play a clip inside the Update(), because it would restart playing over and over again, like stuck. These were mainly for sounds that I wanted to appear with Panels, so at the end I added an Audio Source to the Panel and it works fine. This part was a lot of fun! Sound definitely makes the gaming experience better. Useful links (where I found the music and SFX): Soundim...

For the boss fight I wanted the boss to enter the screen, stop going towards the player, make the intro animation and then start the fighting. Well this was a ride. After entering the screen she collides with an area that should make her stop and only move up and down but it wasn't working at all. After much testing, I added two different scripts, one to the Empty object parent that moves towards the player and the other one with all the boss coding. And it worked! All the animations too, the animator looks like this: Then the boss starts shooting. I made the laser way bigger and bright red, I linked a tutorial at the end of the post. Also I added a Slider as the boss' health that decreases when it gets hit. I made the boss pretty easy (health 10 and damage is -1, so you only have to hit her 10 times). Also during the boss fight oxygen cans are being spawned every 5 seconds just in case the player needs oxygen to not die! When the boss is defeated it spawns a lo...