Below Ground - postmortem

Below Ground: Postmortem

Concept/Design: Pulled the idea together pretty quickly with the team. Original idea was for the player to wake up under ground (in a lab), and make his way to the surface (by finding a key and unlocking the exit door). We also wanted the story to be given to the player through environmental objects that when interacted pop up with clues as to why the player is there (like news clippings on the ground or an unlocked computer). 

Scope/Prep: I had worked on the level generation around March 7th or so and got it in a good state (I figured many games would benefit from such a solution, so I wanted it worked out beforehand). I also brushed off some Unity scenes/components that I had used successfully in the past to allow teams to work together but on separate scenes (with them still interacting together). Although this helped the program flow and helped with my process, it probably wasnt as beneficial as it could have been as I ended up being the only programmer.

New stuff learned: In developing I wanted a simple way for the other programmers (and myself) to be able to add music/scenes to load from a drop down in a component. For the audio manager this required me to write to a text file audio clip names when the developer hits the play button on the audio manager scene (after the clip is added). Then in any component that needs to play an audio clip has a drop down which reads from that file, making selection easy. I used a similar solution for loading scenes (the scenes can be selected from a drop down). This was a neat implementation, but ultimately I could have just typed the string name and achieved the same but quicker.

What succeeded: Level generation was pretty easy to implement. Additionally, the input system (that uses events) was easy to implement. 

What failed: Unity has a pretty long compile time and it was starting to become 1 minute and 30 seconds any time I changed a script and hit the play button. Turns out I just needed an Assembly Definition file in my scripts folder and this almost eliminated the wait time. Which is good, because the wait time was starting to drive me crazy.

What would I add if given more time: 

1. AI for the enemies. Right now they just randomly choose a direction. I would also give certain enemies the ability to fire projectile if player is in range. 
2. Add breakable items, that when break give gem (which gives XP to spend on level up)
3. Add gems as item that can spawn
4. Add the story elements, when interacted with give background on why you are underground.
5. Actual end level