Level Blocking (Week 9 Devlog)

Spearbound Update

Welcome to another Spearbound devlog! This week, I managed to implement a basic level to get a better feel for how gameplay could work, as well as added smooth camera movement and a slight head start on creating some enemies. 

Creating the World

The first order of business was to finish designing a tilemap to then add to the game. Last devlog I shared a basic idea for a tilemap design for terrain, however in the end I decided to scale up the sprites to fit with the player's design and proportions more. Once I had it looking how I wanted it to, I added it into Unity and began placing down the terrain of the level. Turned out working looking pretty good with some tweaking, however there were a few technical difficulties with player movement (but I'll get to that later).

Moving the Camera

After the map was created, I realized that the level is far too big for the camera to both fit everything in all at once without the player feeling incredibly small in comparison. To fix this, I initially added a Cinemachine camera to the scene as an easy and smooth way to follow the player. However upon further testing, the player and spear really both needed to be followed at the same time. The approach I took to solve this problem was to add a Target Group object to connect to the virtual camera, that way multiple objects can be followed in a scene at once.

A demonstration of the camera following both the player and spear (as well as showing off the new terrain :p).

Gameplay?

My core idea for the game was enemies would spawn in waves in set locations relative to the player, each wave getting harder as the game continued. The player may earn/select random upgrades after each wave to improve their chances at surviving, similar to Binding of Isaac or Vampire Survivors. I want to create levels with more verticality in mind so that enemies can only be reached with far spear throws.

A section of the map, providing me with a basic idea of where enemies can attack and get speared from.

Player Feedback

From my fellow peer's wonderful feedback, the main flaw with the game at this point in development was the bug that the player world keep getting stuck on / clipping through tiles. I had also noticed it in my playing of the game, however I could not work out what the issue was at the time. One person pointed out that the problem seemed to be that I did not add a Composite Collider module to my tilemap object. The Composite Collider basically changes the collider from each individual tile to all the tiles connected together as one big collider. A very simple fix and only slightly embarrassing I didn't figure out what the issue was sooner. Other than that there were only a could minor quality of life improvements suggested like moving able to move the spear 360 degrees without having to turn and when recalling the spear have it move to the player rather than teleport, which are both things I intend to add in the near future.

Final Stuff

Despite that being all the progress I had made on the game this week, in my spare time I came up with the start of an animation for a potential antagonist / enemy for the game. The idea is that this enemy will be able to float around the world shooting projectiles at the player, making them a difficult moving target and a serious threat to the player. They will likely be a later game enemy, but I do love how they have turned out so far, with their cloak and staff and just as bad posture as the player character.

Animation for a potential enemy with wobbly legs and a cool looking staff.

And that brings us to the end of another devlog! Very pumped to start adding enemies to the game by next week. Thanks for reading and I hope you've enjoyed my game development journey thus far! :)