Brain*Mart: On the Road to Playable Demo

Didn't make huge progress this week. I may, or may not, have been a little distracted by playing a Vanilla World of Warcraft server. I find the game really inspiring--while it also steals my free time, thus preventing me from acting on the inspiration. Point is--I didn't make the leaps and bounds I had accomplished on the first week.

I did do a few things:

1. Level Building: I put together an environment. It's about three screen-sizes squared--not so big that you get lost, but does require some work moving around and getting to the zombies. The level also includes a sidewalk. It's inaccessible to the player through MathF.Clamp. Anyway, the zombies come in off the street and then leave the same way. Speaking of...

2. Sliding Door: To create an entrance for the zombies, I decided to make a sliding door with four panels. Just for funsies. But it turned out more challenging than I expected. I think it's because the whole time I was writing the code, I kept thinking up future problems. So I spent a lot of time trying to solve problems that didn't exist yet. 20 lines of code later and I was so lost I didn't know what to do. So I started from scratch and it works.

3. Zombie Spawner -- This was essential. I needed a way to "design" the game without having to code every level. So the zombie spawner does more than just instantiate zombies. I have a max amount of zombies that can spawn ever, which can be overridden by clicking the "Unlimited" bool to true. I also have a limit on how many zombies can be in the scene at one time, as well as, how much time must pass before the next zombie can spawn.

I'm still contemplating on ways to mix it up. Should I create waves? Should I designate which brain each zombie should have? Should I set different berserk time lengths? Should it be random and influenced by chosen difficulty?

Definitely worth testing.

4. Nav Route Selector -- Gave me a little trouble. I have game objects I call "Routes". Each route has a list of "Nav Points". I fill the nav points with trigger boxes that serve to both be a target vector as well as set the zombie on a new target when it's reached.

Here's a video of a quick playthrough:

My next goals:

1. Clean up my code. I've been listening to Unity scripting tutorials at work and they advise keeping scripts short and focused. I agree--as my scripts have become a bit unruly. That's mostly from discovering what I need the script to do as I write it. Since I see how everything is working as a whole, I can hopefully streamline a lot of it.

2. Stand-in art. I want to get some 2D art for the player and zombies in the game. I feel as I start testing, that will make the experience more enjoyable for players. I think the environment can be more abstract, but seeing pills from Dr. Mario walk around is probably off-putting.

3. Create a demo. I want to get people playing this game asap. It's essentially playable--but I would like to have: a. A Menu. B. Tutorial--playable--to explain the mechanics. C. End screen with player score.

4. Click Controls. I ultimately see this being on mobile, so I need to start creating a control scheme that translates easily into touch. Hopefully I could do that before finishing a demo.

5. Stretch goal--some audio.

6. OH, and I almost forgot. I feel the floating brain cards and zombie clouds are little--weird. having them float about in 3D space isn't quite working for me. I'm considering making them UI elements on the 2D canvas. I found a video on how to accomplish that, so I want to play around with how that affects the experience.