Week 11 - User Interface / Polish

Welcome back!

Hey all,
It's reached that time of the week again, friday afternoon. Which means its time to update on a few of the things I've implemented over the last week (or weeks as I worked on some of these things previous to this week.)
There was one thing I had done that I forgot to mention:

Circle colliders on Players and Enemies

I had a problem that occurred early on and I don't think I mentioned how I (and Lindsay) fixed it was the player occasionally getting stuck and unable to move in a certain direction. Turns out it was because the player's polygon collider had a point on it and it was catching on the join of the wall colliders. Changed it to a circle collider and problem was sorted.

Now to the part that we all wanted to talk about this week!

Power ups!

I wanted to add power ups to the game for a while now, but just hadn't had the time. Finally got around to it this week and added three types of power ups, Health, Mana and the fabled LAZOR potions respectively. The Health potion will heal the player 20 hit points, the Mana potion will instantly refill the players mana to full and the LAZOR potion will increase the LAZOR's ability to bounce by a lot, allowing the player to hit enemies from much further away!

The Health Potion implementation was just a matter of adding a small script that did negative damage to the player. Sorted.
The Mana potion implementation was a little more difficult, because I couldn't just do the same as the Health potion, as I wouldn't know how much mana the player would be at when they collected this power up. So instead of doing damage, it just changes whatever the current mana is to the full amount (100).
And finally, the LAZOR potion. Now the implementation of this I had been stewing on for a week or so before I stepped into it. The LAZOR code limits the number of bounces, so all I had to do was temporally adjust this to a bigger number. Add a small coroutine in to wait a period of time and then set it back. Done. 

In addition to all of that, I added a particle effect to each of them so that when collected, they would show a heal/mana refill/lazor effect to denote the collection.

Music and sound effects

As much as I enjoy playing Ricochet, it needs some kind of ambience to it whilst its played. To this end I added two music tracks to it, one for the menus (Start menu, Dialogue and Control scenes) and one for the main scene where its played. These I grabbed off Fesliyan Studios Royalty Free music (Link in references) as they had a nice fitting tune that suited Ricochets style quite well.

I addition to this I also added a small piece of audio to the player when they fired the LAZOR. I got this from Sound Fishing website (Link in references). It adds a resounding effect that the player is doing something more than just a line that appears in front of them.

Minor updates

I noticed since last week that the chunking refill of the mana potion wasn't very appealing and another tester (Cheers Kevin!) found that occasionally the mana potion would stop refilling. After reviewing the code a bit more, found that the script that was responsible for filling the mana had a minor bug in it. Fixed it and also changed it to fill 1 mana point at a much quicker interval, so it looks like its filling smoothly instead of in chunks.

Things I would like to add

If I had more time (or after semester is finished) I would be looking at adding the following:
Different death sound to each of the enemies.
Enemies requiring multiple hits to destroy (this would be different depending on the enemies), this would be akin to hit points.
High score screen that would keep the players high score over progressive games.
A better searching algorithm (probably A Star) for the enemies to search for the player.
More PowerUps!

References

8 Bit Menu.mp3 
D. Renda, 02 Jan 2019, https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/royalty-free-music/downloads-c/8-bit-music/6, viewed on 29 Sept 2020.

Retro Forest.mp3
D. Fesliyan, 09 Dec 2019, https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/royalty-free-music/downloads-c/8-bit-music/6, viewed on 29 Sept 2020.

heat-vision.mp3 (Laser Gun 01)
Sound Fishing, https://www.soundfishing.eu/sound/laser-gun, viewed 29 Sept 2020.