New Puzzle - Plate Shards! At the beginning of this sprint, the first thing I did was start work on a new puzzle, one about broken plate shards. The context is the player finds these broken shards of an antique plate stored away, and these shards have dried blood spatters on them! Upon putting the pieces together, the player will have the complete object in their inventory.
By having basic piece manipulation mechanics like this, I hope to be able to test the player's spatial reasoning. In the future, hopefully we may have more complex and interesting reorganization puzzles using these mechanics.
Tutorial Puzzle Besides working on a generic puzzle, I also teamed up with a designer on the team to work on the tutorial puzzles. We were tasked with teaching the mechanics of the game and leading the player to the eventual discovery of Alfred's Will. We tackled this by first listing out the mechanics we want to teach, followed up by the list of events we wanted them to experience.
This is documented by going through the order of challenges and puzzles, and listing out what the player has to do to move on as well as how this moment teaches them game mechanics.
Unity UI Research
The last thing I did this sprint was re-familiarize myself with Unity UI as well as look into new UI classes I might use based on our UI artist's wireframes. For the wireframes, I thought a few different topics would be interesting: Animation, Auto Layout in Unity, and Touch Input.
For Animation of UI elements, it's actually not too different from using the Animator component on normal GameObjects. Something to note is that UI selectable elements already have a few states build in, default, highlighted, press, deactivated. Auto Layouts in Unity are based on the concept of elements and controllers. Layout elements have data about how big they want to be, so their min, preferred, and flexible width and height. An example of this would be Buttons and Text objects. Layout controllers calculate sizes for elements based on those elements' values. An example of this is Content Size Fitter and Aspect Ratio Fitter objects. Lastly, there are also Layout Groups which are elements, but control the positions of other elements (usually children of the group object). Touch Inputs are not as crazy as I thought they would be. Unity keeps track of finger touches in an array of properties, and each finger touch has a property called 'phase' which is more or less the state of the finger, whether it's just moved, been stationary, etc. Keeping track of finger touches and trying to program around that will be interesting, but at least the basics seem simple.
Commenti