It’s been a while. I wanted to do one of these every month but unfortunately, development has been slower than I wanted.
I started by creating a level select screen. This screen is accessible in both single and multiplayer (originally only in multiplayer). For singleplayer, the levels that you haven’t unlocked will not be accessible making the player have to beat them first in the main game. For multiplayer, they are all unlocked right off the bat so you can get right into the game with a friend.
I began work on the next few levels that needed to be made.
This level is the “Test_Launch” level where the player is near a launch pad for a rocket. In this level, the main obstacle to avoid is the flamethrowers which randomly spout fire which burns objects and hurts the player. In this video, we haven’t made any models for the level so we are using the models from the underwater level.
Next, I worked on the “Rocket” level where the player is now inside a rocket which will be launched into space. In this level, the player must avoid lasers which are getting shot down from above. Once again, this uses models from the underwater level since I just copy-pasted the scenes. This level takes place on Earth and then in space. I made the animations of the launching and while it’s not perfect it gives the illusion of being launched into space.
While working on the final boss I encountered this bug which I found amusing.
Saving and Loading
There is now a save function in the game. It’s a bit messy on the UI in the game as it was put in when we hadn’t thought of it but it works.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer has had some changes to it too. All of the modes for multiplayer now work properly and we made it so you can now play the main game in co-op too. There may still be some bugs with this but it should only be UI issues and not gameplay issues. Also, something that is somewhat fixed is players 1 and 2 are now separate. What I mean by this is Player 1 can only be the keyboard and Player 2 has to be a controller. While this is not entirely what I wanted, this is an improvement from before where Players 1 & 2 could control both players regardless of what control scheme they used.
Optimisation and Cleaning of Code
While sorting out multiplayer, I managed to optimise and clean some of the code as I realised a lot of it was unnecessary so that has made it a lot neater. I also went over and commented a lot more in the code so it makes it easier to understand what things do.
Overworld
There’s been a few changes in the overworld, however, not as much as I would have liked. The first thing that changed is something I did which was to create the grass and the grass texture for the floor. This is the grass texture I made, I used Mezzotint and Oil Paint to get this pattern. It is in black and white because once in Unity, we can change the colour of this to whatever we want rather than limiting ourselves to just green.
For the grass model, I created it in Blender. I haven’t used Blender in a long time so I’m sure there is a better way to do this but the grass models are 3D rather than just planes. This doesn’t appear to affect the game’s performance but if it were to go on a phone then it might struggle a bit. I think the grass works a lot better than the grass we had before so I’m pleased with it.
Here is what they look like combined. There are a few minor changes to the terrain but that is stuff my friend did.
I believe that is everything new that has been developed unless I forgot something. We are nearly done with this, most of the things left to do are Music, SFX, Modelling and Texturing and general bug fixes if we encounter anymore.