Troglodyte in Underbelly

Author: Daniel Reder  The underbelly cave system is meant to create an atmosphere that is both scary and somewhat confusing. Because of this, the elements of the underbelly need to be unpredictable, yet constant. There must be elements that will trigger enough to keep the player immersed, but not at a pace that can be recognized. To handle this, I created an object I call the Soundcue. Soundcue's all know about each other, and hold a list of sounds that can be triggered by the player entering a collider.   Once the players has entered any of the triggers connected to the object, the sound will play in an area near the player that they cannot reach. This will disable the other triggers, in order to prevent sounds from overlapping each other, as this would easily break immersion. After the sound finishes playing, a delay up to a set maximum will be set, not allowing any sounds to play until the delay is over.

Quested Abode Jordan Ireland This development cycle was dedicated to creating a new house scene with enhanced aesthetics and implementing a new quest or goal system featuring journal entries to track progress and discoveries. The objective was to design a house environment that not only looked visually appealing but also contributed to the immersive storytelling experience. Additionally, the implementation of a quest system with journal entries aimed to provide players with clear objectives and a sense of direction while exploring the game world. Failing to achieve these goals would result in a lackluster player experience, where the narrative and progression elements may feel disjointed or incomplete. The challenge involved designing and implementing both the new house scene and the quest system with journal entries. For the house scene, I focused on creating visually stunning environments by leveraging advanced lighting, textures, and props to evoke a sense of atmosphere and...

Author: Shemaiah Nelson Date: 3/25/2024 During this week's development for "Troglodyte In Underbelly," I was tasked with implementing a setting within the options menu to control the ambient light in the scene. While this seemed straightforward initially, I soon realized that integrating this feature posed significant complications due to the existing day-night cycle system. The primary issue stemmed from the interaction between the ambient light setting and the dynamic changes in lighting dictated by the day-night cycle. While I was able to successfully implement functionality to control the ambient light, it became apparent that any adjustments made were overwritten whenever the time changed as per the day-night cycle. This resulted in inconsistent lighting conditions and detracted from the immersive experience we aimed to deliver to players. To overcome the challenges encountered with implementing ambient light control within our game's options menu while preservin...

Unified Environment Jordan Ireland This week, a significant focus was on remaking the house map to better align with the aesthetics of the Underbelly environment. Previously, the house map felt out of place due to its different style compared to the Underbelly map. To address this, I revamped the house map, extensively adjusting terrain and lighting to create a more cohesive visual experience. However, challenges arose due to technical issues such as models with two-faced rendering and compatibility issues with Unity's tree system in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). These issues led to inconsistencies in lighting and required the recreation of shaders for foliage elements like leaves and bushes. Failing to resolve these issues would result in visual discrepancies and a lack of immersion for players transitioning between the house and the Underbelly. The House Map Before: The core challenges stemmed from technical limitations affecting lighting and foliage renderi...

  Author : Daniel Reder In almost every video game, balance is a very important aspect. A game where the player is over tuned feels too easy to play, while a game where the enemies are overturned may make gameplay tedious. Troglodyte In Underbelly is no different, where as the enemies must be tuned to match the areas they reside in or the player may run into scenarios that are too easy or too difficult.  In this case, the rat enemy's default stats had it tuned for a much more open area. However, the area the rat actually resides in is very tight quarters.  Because of this, the values of the rat had to be tweaked in this instance in order for the rat to not simply run the player down upon arriving in this area. The rat works off of sound, meaning that when the player sprints, the rat moves towards the players last known location. When the player walks, the rat's ability to detect the player is diminished. The rat was hearing the player from too far away, while also no...

 Troglodyte In Underbelly: Git Issues This week, while adding some of the prefabs I created and the new Oasis 2.0 map, I encountered some issues related to Git. This was similar to one of the issues my teammate was having last week related to file size. The House map, for some reason, went from 6 MB to more than 600 MB. I had used the map to test the prefabs and then deleted them at a later commit, but for some reason, the map file size was huge. Later on, I was able to fix the file size (This was because somehow the map rebuilt itself using Global Illumination On in the terrain settings, so I just had to turn that off). But even after fixing the file size, it was complaining about it being too big. I figured this was because past commits still had that issue, so I looked into it.  I tried some solutions suggested by people, but nothing seemed to work. In the end, this resulted in both the Main Map and the House map having a duplicate index, which was throwing an error that wo...

 Author: Shemaiah Nelson Date: 3/13/2024 This week, I tackled the challenge of implementing multiple save files in our game "Troglodyte In Underbelly." The objective seemed straightforward: create a system that allows players to manage and switch between different save files to accommodate multiple playthroughs or save states. While I successfully developed functionality to create and manage these save files within the game session, I encountered significant difficulty accessing them once the game closed and was reopened. Despite my best efforts to ensure the persistence and accessibility of save data, I found that the save files were either inaccessible or overwritten upon restarting the game. This limitation severely undermined the usability and functionality of the save system, preventing players from seamlessly resuming their progress or managing multiple save states effectively. I created 2 scripts called SaveSlots and SaveSlotMenu, you've created a user interface co...

Sleep Sync Jordan Ireland In the recent development phase, a significant challenge arose regarding refreshing biomes upon player sleep and establishing communication across different scenes. The task involved ensuring that when a player slept in one scene containing a bed, the biomes in other scenes would update accordingly. However, since these biomes were not loaded at the time of sleeping, synchronizing their state posed a considerable challenge. Failing to address this issue would result in inconsistencies between the player's actions and the game world's state, potentially leading to a disjointed and immersion-breaking experience for the player. One system our game uses is to cap the amount of resources that a biome can spawn. This includes things like limiting the number of super rare resources, like Glacium , to 1-3 depending on the biome. It also has a lower percent chance to spawn, close to 1% only. The sum lets us use a random number that will be in that r...

 Troglodyte in Underbelly: Quick Sand Jose Davila While working on one of the new prefabs I was wondering how to capture that effect of slowly sinking and slowing down on a pit of Quick Sand. The answer was much simpler than I thought, and instead of giving some crazy properties to the sand itself, I just modified the values of the gravity and speed of the player, giving the illusion of sinking and being slowed down.   When playing around with the number to give gravity that sinking feel, I found something interesting. It has to be as close to zero as possible. Right now, when setting the Sink Speed in the project, the number has to be really high, so I'll change it so it's between 1 and 10. The only real issue I'm facing right now is activating the trigger when not exactly on top of the object. The trigger box is slightly up even though I did it intentionally.  I might correct this by using a cube and a perfectly aligned trigger box. This might delay the trigge...

 Author : Daniel Reder Source control has allowed programming as a whole to grow. However even with it being as powerful as it is, source control does have its limits. Recently, the main section of the underbelly map has reached a point where source control cannot auto merge, and will require a manual merge every time. This can be very problematic, as diffing a file as large as the main scene would take too much time. The other solution is to never have two people working on the same file. In the end, that was the solution I chose.  The solution to this problem was to work on a clone of the main map scene while anyone else was working in the map. This meant that I could have source control managing my work while not causing crazy conflicts in the main scene. After the work in the main scene was done, I would copy what I created in the clone scene and add them to the main scene. This could only be done after whoever else was working on the main scene was done however. If I were...

Author: Shemaiah Nelson Date: 3/13/2024 This week, I took on the task of implementing a comprehensive save loading system for our game "Troglodyte In Underbelly." The objective was clear: enable players to seamlessly persist their progress across different scenes, retaining vital information such as the player's position, time of day, collected items, and discovered ores scattered throughout the map. However, as I delved deeper into the development process, I encountered significant challenges that tested my problem-solving skills and technical acumen. One of the primary hurdles was ensuring the persistence of saved data between scenes. Despite initial efforts to serialize and desterilize game data, I struggled to establish a seamless transfer mechanism that preserved the player's progress accurately. Furthermore, incorporating dynamic elements such as the player's position, time of day, collected items, and discovered ores added layers of complexity to the save l...

Biome Harmony Jordan Ireland During the recent development cycle, a key focus was on modifying the biome manager to ensure accurate loading screen updates and addressing a critical bug associated with the animation system when jumping with a lantern. The challenge lay in synchronizing the biome manager with the loading screen to provide players with meaningful visual feedback during transitions. Simultaneously, the erratic behavior of the animation system during lantern-assisted jumps posed a potential disruption to gameplay immersion. Failure to resolve these issues would lead to a disjointed loading experience and negatively impact the overall game polish, affecting player satisfaction. The biggest issue was a while loop that essentially froze the game while it was spawning causing the loading screen to freeze as well once the scene was "loaded". This was fixed by swapping the function to an IEnumerator and letting the game update every time the loops ran. ...

Author : Daniel Reder  In terms of gaming, inputs are used to link actions in real life to actions in game. For example, if the player wanted to walk forward, most games would involve pressing the w key to have the in game character walk forward. In Unity, this cannot be performed alone, as the character must have physics attached in order to walk. This is done through the object known as a character controller. However, the character controller has exclusive control over the physics surrounding the in game character. This week I added sections to the underbelly where if the player jumps in to the hole, they will teleport into another section that looks identical, but is not actually the same area. To do this, I teleported the player to a specified location when the player hits a trigger after jumping. However, initially code would not perform what was intended to happen. This was due the the character controller, as relocating the player was a physics related problem and the the p...

Author: Shemaiah Nelson Date: 3/6/2024 For this week I started creation on the Loading Screen and reworking the map functionality to enhance player navigation and immersion in our game. While this endeavor yielded promising results with the successful implementation of a Loading Screen for transitioning between the main menu and levels, I encountered two challenges. Firstly, I was having issues aligning the indicator for the player's position accurately on the map. Secondly the original design of the map seemed to disappear allowing for the player Hud to persist when switching to the map. Additionally, during the creation of the Loading Screen, I faced the complexity of accommodating three different transition scenarios between scenes. Each distinct version of the Loading Screen needed different requirements for their triggers. The Loading Screen had another issue of not accurately displaying the progress of the scene's loading progress. This multiplicity of des...