This initially started as an attempt to move this project to URP, but quickly turned into a clean-up job to get the project ready for beta #screenshotsaturday #medievil #timburton #halloween

New camera, new movement, new targeting, new dissolve system. Gamepad has rumble – Generally the whole controller and feel has been revamped, though the differences aren’t huge as far as the final animation looks – same animations – the code is cleaner, there are less glitches all around and cleaner systems have been setup (for example I replaced my camera with cinemachine, which allows for more stuff with less code down the line)

So here you can see how I made sure that the axe works as I want it, first you can see that there is some targeting going on, which has some tolerance and thus we can target enemies easier

Then when the axe is thrown you can see a variety of lines, these are used to make sure my vectors are all as expected

• gray lines mean a connection was checked, but target was far away or not closest
• red means that there was an obstacle
• green means that this was a valid path
• blue line are for initial throws
• magenta for returning to hand

Then in part of the video you can see me fighting some of the old enemies, with minimal fixes due to the transfer I am far more happy with how things perform now and I am a better coder, so: yeah, that makes sense

Follow the game here:

gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com#/games/jack-mclantern/360808
itch.io: https://swearsoft.itch.io/jackmclantern

Jimmy covered the game and featured it in his list of top games for May (2019)

And the Annoying Orange gaming channel also did a video playthrough of the alpha:

So I released version 0.3.8 last week and I am currently working on 0.3.9, trying to finish the first level and collecting material for the second one.
In the meantime a youtuber called JimmyVegas – he does youtube videos on Unity – covered an earlier version of the game with a playthrough which went pretty well considering the level was pretty empty at the time, here it is:

After version 0.2.8 I wanted to flesh out more of the level, so I started placing rocks, trees and of course enemies.

I also made some changes in order to better accommodate mouse/keyboard play, most notably you now run at full speed when you hold down shift, making the standard speed a bit more manageable for most players.

Now usually I let people know about this in the controls menu, but it seems a lot of people don’t look at those, like ever. So I decided to add a tips interface, at least until I make an actual tutorial for the game, but that’s not for a few months, so:

As I was testing I remembered my notes: make the enemies disappear more ‘gracefully’, I also noticed that enemies weren’t responding as fast as their number increased.

So first I tackled the ‘dissolve’ effect, since I want to do something similar with the weapons and I had already bought an asset to help me out:

Jack I don’t feel so good

So now the enemies dissolve when they die, from top to bottom, which was pretty easy to setup with ‘Advanced Dissolve’:

Then I tackled the enemy performance issues. Initially I was aiming for more compact spaces, but going around the map and exploring is part of the experience, but that means that enemies are in higher numbers. My first attempt focused on the enemy control script, I disabled it when the enemies were not visible in  a way that would keep them working correctly when not.

This worked, but it turns out my script wasn’t the issue,  I am using Unity Navmesh for the enemy navigation, the level is big, the enemies are many and the system has a built in system to defer calculations to reduce slowdowns, which means that the enemies weren’t as responsive once I passed a certain threshold.

So I implemented my first idea: divide them into groups/areas and enable/disable based on distance.  Their paths are pretty much irrelevant unless you are near them, so having them be alive at all is not needed, this works and lightened the load quite a bit. I’m going to explore more options, but for the moment this is enough, now that I have the enemies in clusters I can set their parameters in clusters as well: for example maybe using a lower quality solve for the Navmesh the further away from the player enemies are.

Anyway, some more adjustments to the stats and general values, clean up and of course dissolving barrels.