Ball Box - Week 3
- Jason Warrick
- Jul 17, 2022
- 2 min read
Following the development of a physics-based dexterity and puzzle game.
This post was meant to be published on June 23, but I wasn't able to publish it then, so here it is now!
I started the week off with the dialogue system, of which I built following a Brackeys tutorial. It worked pretty well as it, and was super easy to follow so I was pretty satisfied with the result! It was also a pretty simple method that didn't really use too many elements I wasn't familiar with, so I understood it pretty well as well! After I had the basics built, I started to modify the system to suit my needs.
My first, and largest addition to the dialogue system was that of multiple speakers, which wasn't too terrible to figure out. Essentially, there is just now an array of speakers within each DialogueTrigger component, which the trigger iterates through, only closing the dialogue prompt when all of the speakers are done.
This is the code for the new dialogue triggers, which shows the array of individual dialogues and how it iterates over them. It's pretty simple and I'm quite chuffed with it!
And this is the section of code that was changed in the dialogue manager, that accesses the dialogueFinished boolean in the trigger code, and either closes the dialogue or prompts it for another speaker based on that.
A Short Hike has been a pretty influential game for me as of late, so I wanted to use the idea of warm colors and a pixelated 3D aesthetic from it in Ball Box, so I did! I found a tutorial on YouTube that helped me set up the shader, of which I'm still a little lost on, but it works! Shaders are another element of game dev that I want to become very well versed in soon, so this was a good reminder for that. As you can see in the video, I've started to set up the living room scene and altered some of the colors and materials, and I think it looks pretty great! I still need to add some ambient occlusion and whatnot, but for the moment I'm very satisfied!
I finished off the week with more dialogue work, this time integrating it into the level system, which was far trickier than I expected. I might have missed something in the tutorial, because whenever I try to trigger the dialogue from code (instead of the button) it freaks out and doesn't animate or continue at all. With this in mind, the dialogue will be button prompted for the time being! It's not ideal and I hope to fix it soon, I just want to get as many different aspects of the game working before I start polishing that much.
This week was a lot of learning, as well as a huge weight off of my shoulders! I had been secretly worried about getting the dialogue working with the levels and figuring out the shader situation, but this week reminded me how impressive the online community around Unity is, and has me excited for the opportunity to contribute in the future!
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