Lorne - Devlog 06

Now that the more advanced puzzle connection system is working I have built a puzzle for each level and set up the links between levels properly so that we can playtest a basic version of the game. A couple of people have had a go at playesting the game and it looks like the game is going to be quite long. It generally takes people 20 mins to finish the first level (which is the easiest, although it also has to be taken into consideration that people are still learning how to play the game) and if you multiply that by the six levels in the game then it would take roughly 120 mins for people to finish the game. This can’t really be done in one sitting so we need to either shorten the length of the game or add a save system. There isn’t really an agreeable way to shorten the game. 

 We could have fewer levels but navigating the connections between levels is part of the challenge of the game, and one of the most unique aspects of it, and reducing the number of levels would diminish this. The other option is to reduce the size of the puzzles so they can be completed faster. However I went through such pains last week to make the levels bigger that I’m reluctant to do this too. Plus, I don’t think there would be much fun in breezing through a bunch of simple levels. 

 What I really want to do is to make a save system so that players can go through the whole game at their own pace. I’ve been planning to make a save system for this game anyway, I thought it would be a good thing to learn how to do and didn’t need any other excuse to do it. I’ve been looking into a couple of different ways to make a save system and I’m going to get into that next week.

 The other thing I’ve been working on is the lighting. One of the main things that will make one level different from another is the lighting so it’s important that it should be done well and I wanted to get into it sooner rather than later. The main problem that I’ve been having with the lighting is that I want to keep the inside of the ruins as pitch black as possible but on the other hand I want to set up a bunch of lights outside so that I could get the light to look how I wanted. This caused quite a few problems but the main one was performance. Having so many lights in one scene all clustered together would cause the frame rate to drop a lot. It turns out that when an object is rendered in Unity (and this probably applies to all render engines) the object is rendered once for every light that touches it and then the results of all these renders are combined. This meant that I had to simplify my lighting set up considerably but when I did the performance of the game increased significantly.