Project 1 - Scripting

Scripting is something I've always found daunting as I've progressed as a games designer. I've spent extensive time researching while scripting and tried to make games that were similar to things that had been made before. This was so i would have a sort of scripting foundation to work from, however when undertaking Emotion in Motion without really thinking far enough ahead, the idea i had come up with was something out of the ordinary. I wasn’t going to be able to find useful examples of first person rhythm based missile commands.

Given the short development cycle we were given for the project choosing something a bit simpler would have definitely been beneficial, as the end product was lacking core features i wanted to code but didn’t have the skills or time to research them properly. I did manage to write six scripts during the development of the game and each were utilised for different reasons.

The first script i needed to start with, after having problems with my 3D models was a Missile Movement script. I wrote an Enemy Missile Control Script which was used to control the speed of the projectiles heading towards the players. I used a random range to choose between three speeds, i did this so that some projectiles would reach the player faster than others and had to tweak the numbers i chose multiple times to try and get a good balance of hectic pace with achievable results. The other reason i chose to randomise the speeds of the projectiles was so if a player was to play the game multiple times the exact same projectiles wouldn’t be travelling at the exact same speed.

After getting the missile to move forward i realised i needed the missiles to also be destroyed. Originally i wanted a Line Renderer to follow the mouse cursor and destroy the missiles but due to time constraints i ended up writing a script which would allow the player to destroy the missiles on a mouse click. I added a screen-shake effect call to this script so try and give the player good feedback when destroying the missiles but also to make the game more frantic for the player trying to click precisely while the screen is shaking.

Once i had given up on getting a line renderer to destroy the missiles i came to the conclusion that i would add a trail renderer to the mouse and have the on screen cursor follow the mouse. I wrote the Mouse Follow script to accomplish this and purposely made the distance that the cursor was followed a little further out so that the player would have more of a chance to hit the projectiles during the screen shaking.

During my final play-testing i realised that the game lacked many quality of life features which really deducted from the player experience. To redeem this i wrote a script which would end the game when every missile was destroyed and a script which allowed the game to end when the player pressed the escape key (ESC). It was at this time i also realised that the game was missing a crucial part of the source art which was two beams of light one teal and one yellow which pierce through the artwork. Instead of having those as static vision blockers for the player i wrote a Rotation script to make them spin around adding to the visual clutter and a frantic feeling for the player.

Although I had to scrape together most of my code from various ideas I had and i was disappointed that i didn’t get certain features running the way i wanted, the feedback that i got on the missing quality of life adjustments was incredibly valuable to my approach when starting my next project. I made copies of my reusable codes and have kept them in a folder so when i begin a new prototype i can immediately have these crucial aspects.