Starting to See the Finish Line (Beta Build)

One of the first things I wanted to add to give the game a bit more polish was a main menu. I designed it inside of Unity using its built in UI elements, and coded a script to manage all the buttons.

One comment I got back on the prior build was that certain parts of the volume were too loud, so I decided to add an option's menu that lets you pick what volume level you want the music and sound effects to be individually. I also made these variables that carried over to other levels, so the settings wouldn’t just switch up on you every time you died.

Another thing I added, both for the sake of polish and convenience, was a pause menu. It would allow you to freeze the screen and switch up options if need be, or simple quit the game. It can also be triggered by hitting the Escape key.

Earlier on, I thought of simply having items you could pick up that would give your bard the additional strings he needed to play for his full song…but then I gave it some thought and realized that not only did it make no sense for there to be perfectly good lute string lying around, but that pickups were ultimately a little anticlimactic and didn’t really come with an easy way to teach the player about what they had just picked up. So I created Luther the Luthier, an occupation google tells me is the title for someone who repairs lutes and other stringed instrument. Even though it still doesn’t make much sense for a guy like him to be wandering the woods at such dangerous times, I hope players get charmed by his cool beard and mustache and decide not to question the ways of people who love instruments.

In order to add something like an NPC that could talk, I had to design a textbox, and code a dialogue system that would animate the textbox on an off the screen. I also wanted to do this in a way that printed the dialougue out letter by letter, so big props for Brackeys on YouTube for being a huge help with figuring all this stuff out. It was my first time adding a real dialogue system into any game, so it was a challenge, but it ended up very rewarding.

The next thing my game needed was a tutorial, because trying to verbally give a quick rundown of the controls and story to each play tester just wasn’t very efficient at this point. I made some enemies that can neither hurt you, nor chase you, and are just rocks, that you can cure of the forest's curse. I think this is a simple way for the players to learn how the game works, as they can not move on to the next level without curing every rock. It's a safe place to experiment and learn the mechanics before literally throwing them to the wolves.

… I couldn’t come up with a clever way to teach the uncommon controls I made for this game though, so for now at least, a prompt from the gods of music work well enough.

I drew a few new sprites for this update of the game, including some sprites to prettify the UI, a cloud that keeps you from leaving until you complete the level, and a post that has a very important note attached to it.

Boom. Lore. I gave my game's storybook of a plot a proper beginning where the player can start to learn about what might be going in the kingdom, and why the rocks are pink and glowing. I also finally feel like I’m at a point that I’m mostly done making all the individual elements that make up a level, and I finally feel like I have enough prefabs ready to now be able to focus more on the level design, and visual elements like animations and maybe lighting. Things like how I also made a script that randomly tints all the trees different colors to make the scenery a little more varied. I’m thinking of adding another NPC, or more decorative sprites for the forest. The next big goal, though, is definitely animation, now that all the gameplay works, it’s time to really bring it to life.