I’m not behind on my posts. We had a week’s break. Truly!
The most important news is that we’ve had to push back our Magical Spell Masters alpha build. Things just weren’t coming together quickly enough; we still need to get a whole bunch of placeholder assets into our project, and there are a couple of important features Fred and I haven’t implemented yet. Still, we’re pleased with our progress. The fact that our combat system is, more or less, fully functional is a great source of comfort. And, as we keep having to remind ourselves, the game is fun. Not all the time—there’s still a lot of tweaking and refining ahead—but it can be an enjoyable and challenging little thing to play.
The biggest two focuses of the past two weeks have been audio and VFX. Fred built a simple, dictionary-based (as in the data structure) audio system. It’s fast, handles the instantiation and destruction of sound objects all in one place, and its playback functions can be called by strings set in the inspector. We’ve thus been able to avoid attaching AudioSources to every single damned game object, which isn’t something I find very intuitive. Or rather, it is intuitive; the rune sound ‘belongs’ to the rune. But that’s not very helpful when you need to rapidly swap out sounds. With our system, once the playback function calls are added to scripts, we can replace audio files without having to re-link clips in the inspector. What’s more, sets of random sounds can be handled by giving files a ‘_Random’ suffix. It’s kind of a mid-point between Unity’s standard, inspector-based audio workflow and a full-blown FMOD implementation. It’s a vast improvement over the way I’ve worked with audio in the past.
And VFX? This is probably the area of our visual presentation we should be most concerned about right now. Magical Spell Masters needs to be juicy. We’ve got a good gameplay idea, but we’re not producing a large amount of playable content. So what’s there needs to sound and feel good. The trouble is, we don’t have a lot of VFX experience on the team. We probably should have acknowledged this and spent more time on particles and effects earlier. But we’re here now, and one way or another we have to find a way to improve this aspect of the game.
We do have some placeholder VFX for our spells, but it’s all pretty rough. Unity’s particle system certainly has a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s hard getting results that don’t look like they belong in an N64 game. We might end up experimenting with VFX Graph. But I imagine that it’ll take a lot of time and practice to get good results.
Anyway, here’s a short clip of our placeholder sounds and VFX:
Alpha soon!