Maple38

EDIT/NOTE: You may notice the time for this devlog says eight hours. No clue why that’s the case. It seems something may have changed on Flavortown’s end, I’m assuming those eight hours come from older devlogs but became unallocated for whatever reason.
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Uploaded the game to itch.io!

Unfortunately it’s quite unfinished, was able to get it to a playable state and that’s all. I ended up losing motivation and don’t have enough free time that I’d want to dedicate any more to it, but it was a great learning experience.

I’ll be shipping it momentarily. If anyone wants to try, it’s available at https://maple38.itch.io/arcade-game — though honestly, I’ll probably delist it after a while.

Alright, the game is now playable! I did some polishing and created my first release. Now I think I need to take a break for a while. I have an assignment due super soon too so I’ll have to go work on that.

Afterwards, I’ll probably continue working on this and hopefully get to a point where I can really call it a game and post a final release.

I think I also want to use the vehicle physics to make another game though honestly.

Aaaanyway, here’s a couple assets attached that I haven’t gotten to show off yet :3

I’M IN PANIC MODE RIGHT NOW!

Okay, so for a bit of context, I’m submitting this game as an assignment for school. Though I do intend on continuing work afterwards, since one of my assessments this semester was just to “make a 2d game in Unity”, this is also being turned in for that grade. Now to be clear, I have 100% freedom when it comes to what I’m doing, and this is still a personal project, so no reports please— the only difference is that I’m killing two birds with one stone by submitting it as coursework too. I’ve already asked about it in the Slack and got approval.

Now with that out of the way, HERE’S THE PROBLEM. THE GAME IS ALSO AT A STATE WHERE IT FUNCTIONS AT A BARE MINIMUM PLAYABLE STATE. I JUST ADDED IN A SPAWNER FOR ENEMIES. BUT FOR SOME REASON, IT’S JUST TOTALLY BROKEN, LIKE THE ENEMIES JUST SPAWN IN AND GO UPWARDS!! I have two hours left until it becomes a 100% personal project and I have to send a build to my teacher(s). But the game doesn’t work! I’ve been up all night too, surviving off monster energy (yum).

In addition to that, I need to write out documentation for everything about the game, which is where the “school assignment” part comes into play (but that time doesn’t get tracked to hackatime anyway so dw about that), I’M RUNNING OUT OF TIMEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Wish me luck I really need it 😭

Did a bunch of misc changes and patches. Also made this awesome fire animation! Like look at this isn’t it dope? lol

I made a healthbar, with animated hearts! I wanted to make it dynamically update according to the player’s max health (as in, spawn in more hearts if the player has more max health), but I just couldn’t get the alignment to work. And after tons of troubleshooting, I just gave up and placed the hearts manually.

Took a bit of code but I also made it update whenever the player takes damage. There’s a demo gif attached, but in that I’m updating the values manually.

I also wrote code to sync the glint animations between the hearts, but for some reason that doesn’t work, and frankly it isn’t too much of a priority. Oh well!

I made audio for the game! Both fairly low effort, but I did learn to use Ableton somewhat, so it took a little while.

The SFX is for the enemy death, kinda just went for the bare minimum I could manage.

The music is a looping track, the actual loop is pretty short so you don’t have to listen to the whole file. I am mildly proud of it though, I think it sounds pretty cool!

Additionally, I went and implemented the audio in the game, and commented almost all my old code. That’s why the devlog is 2 hours, that’s only time spent in the editor, not on making audio (so don’t worry, I’m not cheating with the time or anything), the actual audio making time was probably like 4 hours or so.

Hopefully just renaming the files to .mp4 allows me to upload them 😅
(Spoiler: it did not. But I managed to convert them, so all’s well that ends well!)

Finally implemented proper traction controls! My vehicle physics are passable now, and I’m low on time, so I think I’m going to go work on other stuff now. Later down the line I think I might make an actual driving game, because this is surprisingly fun to play around with!

Attached are four gifs, demonstrating traction levels: 0, 2.5, 5, 10

Vehicle movement physics finally work! Fixed a BUNCH of bugs, including but not limited to:

1. The rotation value being exactly 198,235.2941176471 times smaller than it was supposed to be. This was because for some reason, despite explicitly writing a comment to make it clear that the value had to be converted from RADIANS to DEGREES… I wrote code to do the exact opposite 😭
2. Accidentally using a bitwise OR (|) instead of a logical OR (||). C’mon you can’t blame me for this one.
3. Various stuff related to trigonometry and the way Unity handles vectors and rotation. Because of course.
4. I ACCIDENTALLY MULTIPLIED INSTEAD OF DIVIDING RAAAGGGFHFHGHGHG

After spending quite a while on troubleshooting, I eventually just caved and sent my code over to an LLM for review. So that’s what made me aware of these bugs. Thank you Gemini! No clue how long it would’ve taken me to catch this stuff otherwise, as some of it was extremely specific, and some was just really hard to notice as I even shared a screenshot of the bugs over on the Flavortown Slack and nobody noticed the conversion mistake.

Trying to deal with vectors and angles and trigonometry is so annoying ugh. I can’t be the only one whose brain just melts when dealing with this, right? I mean like why does it have to all work so weirdly, why is 0º pointing up in Unity but pointing right in math class? It’s so annoying. If everything was either vectors or angles, that’d be one thing, but when you end up mixing the two my brain just DIES. Not to mention having to deal with world space vs local space…

Anyway, rant over.

I’m currently just troubleshooting why my cars don’t pathfind properly. For that I had to just spend 40 minutes trying to deal with math stuff, and I just made some pathfinding lines to show the direction the car is trying to move (cyan line).

Wish me luck! (I’ll need it)

Did TONS more work! I had a “bug” with flavortown where it couldn’t see my data for some reason, but now that’s fixed, and I’ve accumulated almost ten whole hours of work over the past couple days!

Attached is a gif demonstrating sprite stacking, which makes my sprites look 3d via parallax. Additionally, I spent hours yesterday trying to make my vehicle physics somewhat realistic, which includes calculating turning radiuses, so there’s a screenshot of that too!

Okay so I’ve made tons of progress, here’s what it looks like currently!

So! This is my progress so far. I’ve created basic scripts for everything, but still have a long ways to go.

I have no idea how to give this game an elevator pitch, so I simply won’t! You’ll see what it is as I post more devlogs.