I’ve been making big improvements on the game (for a beginner game developer). The look is much better and I’ve had some serious obstacles. First, I tried to replace the capsule player with a full 3D model. I knew this would be a non-trivial change because of the way I control the 3rd person view. I had it working, but the animation was choppy for some reason. I decided that it was too distracting and changed things back. But then things stopped working entirely.
I’ve had similar issues in software before. You try to revert a big change and inevitably forget something and your code is left in a weird in-between state. My maze generator was broken. I eventually got that working again, but then the player controls weren’t working. I eventually discovered that the controls only worked when the pause screen was up, which is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen. I had breakpoints and watched variables galore. Nothing made sense.
I eventually got to the point where I was going to remake the whole thing when I thought, “Let me just create a new project and copy all of the assets over to see if that fixes things.” Luckily, that did fix things.
So I learned a number of lessons through that stressful ordeal.
- Don’t forget to use version control, even if you’re just working on beginner projects
- Test things out in a sterile environment (i.e. scene) before making big integrations into your main game
- Like all good software, modularize and decouple your components in case you need to swap them out for something else
- Always play test the build version before you release it. Some bugs may only show up outside of the Unity editor
Here’s the latest playable version: Maze Raider v0.8
v0.7 updates:
- Textured surfaces
- A new power-up item
- and of course, bug fixes
v0.8 updates:
- Added more “powerful” raised perspective power-up
- Added goal indicator power-up
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