Weekly Devlog 4 : Presentation and Graphics

WELCOME TO WEEKLY DEVLOG OF EXILE'S ADVENTURE. 

It’s the fourth episode of this series and the thing i would introduce to you this week is PRESENTATIONS AND GRAPHICS

Why did I choose this for implementing?

Until this week, Exile's Adventure was still lacking a lot in terms of graphics, such as bosses, their skills , or NPCs. So this week I worked on adding these features to the game. However, due to time is limited, I have not been able to complete all of it.  Therefore, in this devlog, I'll just talk about the finished stuff, the rest will be added in another devlog as soon as possible.

How was this created ?

First, let's talk about the guardians. In last week's devlog, I went through the basics of the steps I take to create a guardian, or more specifically a wolf. This week, I did the same to add 2 new guardians: a golem and a demon to the game (still missing one more because Exile's Adventure has 4 different areas). So I'm not going to talk about this in detail in this devlog anymore, instead I just show the material that I used to create them. For the demon ones, I use the spritesheet of William.Thompsonj (and Redshrike as graphic artist ) from  OpenGameArt.org, you can find it here : https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-imp .

Demon guardian spritesheet ( attacking and walking )

For the golem ones, I still use the spritesheet of William.Thompsonj (and Redshrike as graphic artist ), the link of it here:  https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-golem. 

Golem guardian spritesheet (attacking and walking )

The next one thing I also had completed in this week is the bosses.  About the looking and animation of boss, I have used the spritesheet of Redshrike which has been animated by Balmer ( all from OpenGameArt.org , can be found here : https://opengameart.org/content/bosses-and-monsters-spritesheets-ars-notoria ) for creating all 4 boss of Exile's Adventure.  Each boss will occupy an area with different attributes, so I also tweaked their colors a bit that make they can better match their areas.

Boss spritesheet 

The looking of the boss in different area ( Thanks to Courtney for capturing them )

Then, just like when I was creating guardians, I had to write some code to get these bosses work.  The biggest difference here is that the boss will have a system of skills, while the guardian will almost not. Up to now, I have created 2 skills for the boss, which will be explained in detail in the next section. With my first skill, also known as Deadly Area, I created a method that used a loop of the Instantiate command (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Object.Instantiate.html) to randomly create 20 small dangerous areas within the range of the boss room and then destroy them after 5 seconds using the Destroy command (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Object.Destroy.html). I have also used the InvokeRepeating command (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.InvokeRepeating.html) to create a cooldown for that skill.  I will show the code inside the method below 

public void CreateSkill()
{         
    for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++)         
        {             
            var cloneFire = Instantiate(skill, new Vector2(Random.Range(areaBoss.position.x -9 , areaBoss.position.x + 9), Random.Range(areaBoss.position.y, areaBoss.position.y-6)), Quaternion.Euler(0, 0, 0));             
            Destroy(cloneFire, 5f);         
        }     
}

The second skill, which is Teleport, was made much easier than the first. I just write some code to choose random position inside the boss room and then change the postion property of the Transform ( https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Transform.html ) of the boss. InvokeReapeating is still used here to make a cooldown for this skills. You can see the method of Teleport below

public void Teleport()     
{         
    this.transform.position = new Vector3(Random.Range(areaBoss.position.x - 9, areaBoss.position.x + 9), Random.Range(areaBoss.position.y, areaBoss.position.y - 5),0);     
}

One final difference between the boss and guardian in Exile's Adventure is where is the position that they could take damage. Because my original idea was that the boss would only take damage if the player attacks its leg so I created a hitbox on the bottom of the boss where the only place the player could hit. The rest like the boss's health system is still made up like what i did for the guardian so I won't cover it again.

How does this work ? 

Like the wolf from last week's devlog, the two new guardians still work in the same way. They both use a circle to identify whether a player is in a searchable area or within an attackable circle. You can re-read this devlog to better understand this mechanism.

Come to the boss, it is a completely different thing.  With the boss, it will never perform any movement or attack directly on the player at all, but instead, it will stay in place and use spells to damage the player. Because of the time limit, I've only created 2 spells for them, and I'll talk more about those skills below. 

• The first skill of the boss is named Deadly Area. As the name implies, it will create small areas in the boss room that can damage the player as soon as the player enters the room of the boss . These areas will last for a certain time, then disappear before the boss cast this skill again. This skill will be used indefinitely by the boss from the moment the player enters the boss room until the boss is destroyed. This skill will have a certain cooldown, and there will definitely be a gap between the disappearance of those deadly areas and the next use of this skill so that the player can move to the good position for attacking the boss.

Deadly Area

• The second skill of the boss is named Teleport. Unlike the first skill, this skill is not a damage skill, instead it is more like a move skill. More specifically, when the boss is below 50% health, this ability will begin to activate to teleport the boss to another location in the room and make it more difficult for the player to attack the boss as they will have to move along to attack it. 

Teleport

Feedback and Improvement 

In the tutorial time of KIT109 of UTAS, i had received a feedback about the presentation and graphics through some testers, who are my classmates  : 

Andrew : " One immediate thing - The wall that you make traps the player inside if you don't go immediately in, so I can't progress or anything " 

Well this is a bug when I'm trying to creating the wall that lock player inside the room of guardian or boss until the player could defeat them. I immediately corrected it after receiving this feedback and will updated it in the next build.

Courtney : "I think the sprite fits nicely, he's super cool, I love him! Went to one area and was super excited to go check him out in the others.

Colour-wise, I love the original (I took quick little screenshots so I could compare them all, so I could give you accurate feedback), but I also love that they're all different colours. It honestly might be worth changing the colour of the original as well so he fits in a bit better with the others, because he seems a little of place if you put him next to all the others. You can kind of tell a little bit that they've been colour changed and he hasn't, but it's not that obvious when they're not all next to each other.

It also might be cool if you deepen the colour changes a little, to match their attacks or environments a little more and give an even greater differentiation between them all. Right now, the guy with the fire power looks a tiny bit similar to the original, so I would definitely darken him at least. "

I am very happy to receive this feedback because it shows that changing the colors of the bosses was really the right decision for me. I will try my best to match their colors in the future

Come to improvement part, it will definitely be adding the missing guardians (currently missing one of the fire region). In addition to that, I also had the idea to improve the boss's skills. More specifically, it is possible to add 1 to 2 new skills along with the unique ability of each boss. This is definitely going to be a very difficult part, however, I will try to do as much as I can. So, please look forward to the latest updates of Exile's Adventure.