Side Note:
I apologize for posting on SlideDB again after Turmoil Studios posted for Battle Dash not that long ago. I just wanted to share what I have been working on the last couple of days, in which I have gotten way more done than I usually do. Even though the last post was not written with this account, it was written about Battle Dash and again, I am sorry for having two posts about Battle Dash so close to each other.
Bug Fixes
I have made a lot of bug fixes that have been pointed out from our alpha testing. There were some silly ones that I can't believe I missed. Bugs like jumping into the boss battle and having it break because the player couldn't take damage, lol. A lot of the silly ones like that are now fixed, and will ship with Battle Dash 0.2. Here are the most noted bug fixes:
- Fixed bug with player jumping before boss battle
- Fixed input bug where player would randomly move right or jump
- Fixed issue where audio would be disabled by default
- Fixed some camera glitches
- Fixed coin generation
As you can see, I have fixed quite a few things. There are more things that I did fix, but I forgot to write them down in my changes file. The next version of Battle Dash should get rid of some the things that are very annoying as of now.
Smooth Camera
Smooth Camera Code
(Click this image to see it better)
Along with the numerous bug fixes, I also made the camera movement nice. If you go and play Battle Dash now, you will notice that the camera instantly follows the player wherever he goes whether that be up, down, left, or right. With the new and improved camera, when the player moves left or right, the camera will follow but only until a certain threshold. When the player jumps, the camera just stays where is was before the jump. Of course, I could easily add a threshold for jumping as well and it could look better, but I am quite content with the results I have now.
Improved Game Manager
The last thing I would like to mention here is that I have improved the game manager a lot, which is something I have wanted to get to but have been putting off for some unexplained reason. So before the new game manager, I was doing a lot of random things for Battle Dash in code, a.k.a. where the designer does not want to go. I would move the camera to a spot through code, enable UI through code when I had it set up through the inspector, and create methods that did like 3 or 4 things but really should have only performed one. But after this new system that I made, everything is way better in the designer's eyes. I will admit that since I have not made a custom inspector for this solution, it definitely is not the most pretty to look at. But with that being said, I was able to fully setup the game through Unity's inspector(granted, after I made the right event calls in scripts where they were needed). This is exactly what I have been wanting for roughly 2 months.
Aspects of gameplay can be changed with designer friendly Unity Events
(Click this image to see it better)
Now I know this does not look very pretty, and you may even cringe when you look at this. But I promise you, it works amazingly. Some people would say this is detrimental to performance, but they would be wrong for one reason. If these events were being called every single frame(especially for mobile devices), then the performance would be booted out to the curb. But since these events are invoked every once in a while, say when the user presses play or the user restarts, the performance doesn't even budge at all. To be honest, I have not looked at this solution in the Unity Profiler, so there may be a little bit of overhead that I am totally unaware of. I did however, have my frame rate tester going while playing the game on my phone, and the frame rate stayed at a constant 60fps, even when I purposely tried to do everything fast so the events would be invoked more often.
To conclude, I am very happy with what I have been able to get done the last couple days. I do not want to take all of the credit though as Josh, our 3D artist and level section designer, has been creating badass level sections, and our other 3D artist, Kreuzer, has been working on creating unique bosses to fight.
I look forward to writing more of these dev blogs. I cannot guarantee when the next will be, but hopefully it will be near the release of Battle Dash 0.2, which I am pumped about.
Thank you, Kyle Stankovich
