Darkness Encoded (Progress DevLog 1)

Progress DevLog 1:

Player Movement | Collisions | Planning

Darkness Encoded, my 2D sidescroller game made in Unity. This is my first devLog of possibly many for my KIT109 Game Fundamentals game. I am still new to Unity and C# so it will be interesting to troubleshoot and figure it out as I go along. The bar is set high as per usual so I will keep you updated with my journey.

Player Scripting & Movement

So far, in development we need to start with a player, I don't know what my player will look like at this time, so I used a placeholder square to get something down to work with. I want my player to be interactive with the environment and have a starting speed that decreases over time. Creating such a component will be a key component to the game's overall feel and how future upgrades will be applied. The player has a few starting speed variables configurable within the inspector. I used these variables to help tweak how the player ascended and descended, losing velocity and speed over time. When it came to scripting the player movement or better yet 'Squishy Movement' (don't ask why) I fell into the habit of doing everything in one script, and as you could imagine became messy.

Making Progress

At this point my player is beginning to move, well it doesn't look like it should, but I moved past that. In the current early stages of the game, I got frustrated easily as I didn't know how to implement or where to Implement it as I didn't even have a background. This was a visual challenge as yes, I can just use placeholder objects but, in my mind, I couldn't see past them.

Future

As the week progressed, I wondered about future work ahead and thought to myself of ways to feature within the player as the plan was to manipulate the player's Rigidbody component to make upgrades. To move up and down you use 'W' to move upwards and 'S' to go down. The player movement itself is quite simple alone the thing that will separate it is everything else to come. I will need a solid foundation to work with and having the player just move is one less thing to worry about and tick off.

Researching

As most young developers do, I continue to research and brute force my way to the answers with YouTube videos and Stackoverflow posts, shoutout to Brackeys YT for helping me understand player movement. I added a collider to a thin ground object and the same for the player. For now, I just had a debug statement that let me know if they were colliding. I will stop the game and it will boot into the upgrade scene when I eventually get around to building that…

Trial & Error

This week was challenging and with lots of trial and error I feel as if I have a small start to a game, I kept thinking about how to implement animations and a background. I don't know the scope of the game now but what I do know is how easy it is to go down a random rabbit hole trying to find answers. I think one of my greatest hurdles in this project is not just making the game, it is learning how to. I am excited for the development to continue and eager to see the results.