Final Sprint! Refactoring and Debugging!
It’s about day 52 in my path to becoming a Software Engineer though Game Development and we are SO CLOSE to finishing and publishing our team project!
Here’s a sneak peek of some game play:
It’s all finally coming together, and though it was challenging and many obstacles stood in our way, we all rose to the challenge and persevered! There are a few bugs and irregularities that we still have to work out in some instances, like the above animations sometimes not deleting from the screen, but I’m happy to report that of as writing this blog, most of the bug fixes have gone in and an initial post processing build was built out and tested!
That’s right, Nova Star 1.0 is a GO!
I have to say, for a game that was built by a team that has never worked together, some of us, never seeing code, nor unity before this project, I’m am so proud of the game that we’ve put together. We all had a part to bring to the table, and everyone (including leadership) had no small part in making this project successful.
Though it’s not completely finished and published, I’m confident that we’re in the home stretch, and now the fun part of post processing is coming up along with some marketing strategy and refactoring. We all want to make this as clean and polished as we can in the short time that we were given.
The part of the project I’m personally most proud of for my own contribution. Definitely has to be the UI! I love a clean looking UI and though I wanted it to be simple, I also wanted it to be functional, and fun to look at! The way the scripts interact with the UI is unique as well, having to activate, deactivate, and call on functions with interactions and buttons. It was all such well, FUN to navigate and figure out. I didn’t have to tackle this matter alone as well, the help of my teammates to make different panels for different functionality of the UI.
CODING SPOTLIGHT!!!
In order to make the pause menu, well PAUSE the game, a very simple script is called to make time…pause. Calling Time.timeScale results in basically telling the program what the Time Scale is with 0 being paused in time and 1 being normal time passage.
It’s honestly been a ton of fun figuring out new ways to implement things that we all take for granted as players! A pause menu is such a common thing, I’ve never even thought to stop and think… how would that be implemented? Until that is, I had to implement it! The best part about this process? I’m already thinking: How would changing the time scale to lets say .5 for slow motion or could the time scale go beyond 1? Also, what crazy shenanigans could I get up to with this knowledge — the possibilities are endless.
By tomorrow, we are hoping to have the game debugged, post-processed, and published to itch.io, so those following along — look forward to it!
— Ryan
RULER OF (GAME)TIME.TIMESCALE
