These last two weeks were something special. I thought Blender was THE most confusing software, and the easiest one to accidentally mess everything up in, that I knew of, but Unity (and especially using Unity together with GitHub in a team) managed to steal that title. I can’t even count on both hands the number of times work was lost between merges, pushes, and pulls, having to be redone from scratch all over again.
It was quite stressful, but fortunately, we managed to present a rudimentary version of the prototype on 05/06 and deliver an even better version on 05/14. The leap we made in 1 week was scary, really; basically, we had to do a whole redesign of tiles and sprites, on top of creating quite a few more.
The prototype we presented on the 6th looked like this:
And the one we delivered 1 week later:
I am quite proud of our progress. I am almost certain I am a bit more nearsighted than I was two weeks ago, after so many hours straight in front of the computer screen, but it was worth it.
I was in charge of the entire pixel art side of things, in addition to building the map and adding the collision systems, lights, map bounds, camera bounds, “teleportation” from one room to another, the user interfaces for the inventory, ID, and making them appear with the keybinds, the dialogue boxes and dialogues, and also the music and sound present in-game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the main menu music done in time, but it is also in production and on the way. I also gave a little help to my colleague Ines with the pause and main menus, since we were struggling a bit to get them working. The other features present in the prototype were implemented by my colleagues Lara and Mafalda.
We still intend to add at least 2 puzzles to this first level, extend the map, and make the process of finding the pieces a bit harder. We will be developing it over the next few days, since now we only have the final delivery on June 22nd. By that date, our game will only have 2 of its 4 levels implemented, as per the professor’s recommendation we want to focus on bringing an experience as close to professional as possible. The rest of Eclipse will be developed outside of the academic context, since all of us really like the idea of our game and want to see it complete and available for people to play.