This week of development was a little slow and I found it hard to motivate myself. It was probably a combination of trying to complete other major assignments and the end of the semester. I’ve worked non stop on this particular assignment so I guess I'm feeling a little burnt out. The game is also near completion so there isn’t particularly major things that need addressing. So I also found it hard to figure out what exactly I should be working on. Nevertheless I did make some progress with the addition of more audio and various bug fixes.  

Audio

Our sound designer has made some amazing sounds so it was great to finally start adding them to the game. The sounds that I added were various surface sound like stone, metal and wood. Each surface had a run, land and a hit which would play depending on what the player was doing and on what surface. There were also sounds for various player movements like jumping, dashing and doing special attacks. The addition of these sounds served as great feedback for players and made a lot of the actions like hitting a surface with their sword feel impactful and meaningful. It's amazing to hear how the addition of quality sounds breathes  life into a game and how it gives it context. It’s something you generally don’t notice when playing games but when its not there you do and really hinders your experience.

Using Scriptable Objects

The biggest problem I had to tackle during this week was trying to get all the correct sounds on the hundreds on game objects in the scene. To alleviate this problem I designed a system using scriptable objects. This system uses two scripts; a script that is placed on the object that has all the audio logic and scriptable object that holds all the audio clips. The script is first placed on a scene object and then associated scriptable object is slotted into the component. I designed this system to be a simple as possible for our environmental designer Tom so that he doesn’t have to spend time adding each sound clip to its associated surface.

This system also allows the audio to be completely scalable and modular. If I wanted to added more sound or replace them I don’t have to spend time going through all the objects in the scene and adding each sound manually to each surface instance. All I  have to do is change the one scriptable object in the assets folder and then all instance with that scriptable object will be changed.

It was great to finally be able to work with scriptable objects because I had never really used them before. It was interesting to see how they work and exciting to work with something new. They are actually really cool and I'll definitely be implementing them more when designing my further systems.

Where to go next

Over the next week until submission I'll be fixing various bugs and adding more sounds as they come. I’ll also be spending some time revisiting combat to make it a little easier to kill your opponent. Then it’s just polishing the game until the RMIT games showcase.

- Liam McIntosh -