Week 3 Update
This week, I managed to achieve all my goals, which makes me very happy. The hardest part was learning Unity. Before starting this project, I only knew a bit about navigating the graphical interface, creating sprites, and some basic scripting, such as creating serialized fields and swapping object sprites.
Here are the challenges I worked on this week, from hardest to easiest:
- Managing clicks over the apartment layout: The biggest challenge was dealing with overlapping room colliders. I ended up creating my own raycast-based script to find the object with the highest order in the topmost sorting layer from the array that Physics2D.RaycastAll returns. To connect this to the room state logic, I created a super simple game events system by following this tutorial.
- Instantiating prefabs: I learned how to instantiate prefabs so I can open a modal with specific content when clicking on different triggers. These modals will open mini-games and animations.
- Switching between apartment layouts: I achieved this by activating and deactivating objects containing all the rooms.
Here's a little demo gif below.
My Unity challenges for next week are:
- Adding a tool to manage hovering on elements.
- Creating a UI for closing the game.
- Starting to think about the logic of the main game loop, where the player progresses by solving different challenges that open in modals.
I also spent some time learning Inkscape. I found a cool method for learning:
- I watch a tutorial and follow all the steps (lots of pausing and going back).
- I try to do my own drawing (still tracing photos) using the skills from the video.
This week, I learned how to create complex shapes from simple ones by cutting and editing paths. To sum up all I have learned, I drew my favorite stim toy. Maybe it will be in the game, maybe not; I’m still trying to figure out the art style for my game.
Stay tuned for next week’s update!