Devlog #3

Game Project Development Log 

Devlog #3 | 11th May 2025 

Even though I am writing this a week after my previous Devlog submission, I only just found out that it never published and I only ever saved it as a draft. So, this Devlog submission will appear as though it is uploaded the same day as my first submission. Though frustrating and it undoubtedly has outwardly appeared like I haven’t done any work for 2 weeks, this is not the place to voice my complaints about Itch.io. 

After I got player movement and animations working last week, this week I have turned my focus to getting enemy animations and throwing projectiles working correctly. I used the throwing animations that came with the asset pack I purchased. I had to manually reverse a throwing clip and play it immediately before playing the original throwing animation clip, just so it would smoothly animate in and out of the idle clip. This took a lot of initial fussing around. To make it throw a snowball, I wrote a script that contained a function to instantiate a random snowball and add velocity to it in a given direction. The Instantiate function actually took a bit of work to get the correct syntax, and I used AI help with syntax checking and compile errors to see where I was going wrong. I found out about StateMachineBehaviour scripts here Unity - Manual: State Machine Behaviours. I made it call the method in the throwSnowball script upon entering the throwing animation. 

The game is finally taking shape and I have finished implementing the 4 different enemy types, which are all basic version of the same thing, but pointing in different directions. They fire the same projectile, but in the scripts I have made many of the velocity, speed and timing values public so I can easily edit the individual Gameobject instances of them. After getting the throwing animations and scripts working correctly for the first enemy, it was simple enough to replicate it for the other enemies (using the same animator controller layout, just duplicating and modifying some variables). 

I also got hit animations working, when the player hits a thrown projectile and movement is prohibited for a second. This slows the pace of the game down so the player is motivated to try and avoid them at all costs.  

I added presents (collectables) around the place, two types (just different colours) where green ones are easily accessible and the blue ones are situated in more difficult places, like right next to an enemy. When I incorporate scoring, the green ones will give less points than collecting the blue ones. 

For the next week, I will focus on building the level layout and work on a title screen as well, and hopefully have them done for next week.