POLISH -- HEADING TOWARDS THE END !

On March 26th, Jimmy continued to work on integrating Jason’s puzzle for the upper part of the tower which consisted of another Dawn/Dusk interaction and helping each other reach the door to the ice-puzzle by stepping on switches. 

The integration of this was something we struggled a bit on and couldn’t get in time for the beta presentation (however, it was complete) because at first, Jason designed it not based on the character’s jump ratio / size, therefore when implementing it into our current scene, the platform distance wasn’t correctly proportioned and the player could jump over several of the platforms at once. In the end, we got it to work for our final demo.

Once that was finished, there was also a slight stumble when the character gets onto the platform itself, it wouldn’t move alongside it -- meaning that when the platform moved and Dawn/Dusk jumped onto it, the player doesn’t move so they end up slipping off. Jason and Jimmy worked together on finding the solution which was to set the character to be the child of the platform. 

We met on March 28th to talk about what needed to be polished. We made a polishing list and assigned tasks to people once again. Some of these tasks included : scaling the task-list, shortening the tutorial, change item radius to anywhere (as one of our bugs with the potion-bit was that if you weren’t within the correct vicinity of the NPC, you wouldn’t be able to use the item resulting in you re-opening the inventory tab until it worked), changing the SFX sounds to be more/less apparent depending on what you were interacting with, having the 1st option box not be greyed out in the beginning, and polishing up the ice-puzzle level (so it wasn’t grey-boxed but was situated in an actual lit-up room). 

By April 3rd, we had the entire game functionality complete meaning that players wouldn’t be able to ascend the tower unless they collected 2 gems from the lower levels; and only being able to enter the tower when they have 3/3 gems and the progression of the game was fully done. Katrina scaled the task-list and had it so that when players first opened it, all the tasks would appear as “???” and until they unlocked it, then the task would change to be (for example) “collect 3 sun energies for the tree”.  However, in the end, we made the decision to scrap the task-list as it was something many players didn’t notice and in the end, it didn’t seem worth spending so much time polishing a UI that didn’t seem to do anything for our game and added more to our UI system (which was a feedback we received during our Beta presentation). 

There also had to be some changes to the NPC script. Jimmy created a new script in which it handled the entire NPC Quest item handling system of our game (as before, giving the item was integrated with our dialogue system, so he separated the two) which allowed for two ranges in our game -- the talking range and the item usage range. 

While this was happening, I worked on creating the trailer in time for the XP Summit, fixing up the animation in our final scene, making assets for Jason. Ricci made the music for our trailer.  I made visual updates to our game as well on our itch.io page. 

Jason finished polishing the entire ice-level adding a nice reflectivity to the gems as well as set up the entire lighting of the scene and to the doors itself.