Dog Star 3.0

You're still a dog, and you're still hungry for some stars.

Press "a" to move left and "d" to move right. Press the space bar to jump. Press "e" to read signs (or really, just the one sign).

"B" to bark has gone back into beta for now.

For week 1 of this assignment, I attempted to include contrasting systems in my game by placing collectable game objects (in this case, stars) around a platforming-based level. The player character (the dog) would be impeded in their collection of the stars by game objects that were falling meteors, which I wanted to instantiate randomly and continually throughout the level. The player character would be able to interact with the generated meteors, because the meteors would destroy the player character on contact. In contrast, stars would be destroyed by the player character on contact.

Of course, this didn’t go as planned, because my first attempt at a meteor-making script ended up crashing Unity every time I ran it. Too many meteors!

This time around, I put some limits on meteor instantiation which allowed the game to run successfully. I created colliders that destroy meteors so that they aren’t just falling forever in the background even when they’re not on-screen, and I put a cap on the number of meteors that could be on screen at any given time. I also randomized the speed at which each meteor falls for variety’s sake. I placed collectable stars around the level by hand. The game quits if you “die,” or get hit by a meteor. There’s also a countdown text in the UI which tells you how many stars are left. When there’s just 1 star left, the box on the top right of the level disappears to reveal that last star. When the last star is collected, a victory fanfare plays and the game ends.

For the week 2 portion of this assignment, I included a sign that the dog can read. (When I showed this to my roommate, he said I should’ve made the sign gibberish, because dogs can’t read.) It took me a while to fiddle with the canvas correctly to get it visible, but it’s otherwise pretty much the exact same sign-reading system that was in the tutorial videos on Canvas.

I think this could be fun if I had more time to do some fine-tuning. In particular, I want to make the player character faster and more sensitive to controls. With the way the meteors fall and instantiate right now, the game is actually pretty hard to beat! Finer controls would help with that. I think I also need to fiddle with the colliders on the meteors and the player character, because there are definitely times you think you’re safe from a meteor when you’re actually not. The hit boxes could be a little more fair.