Journal Entry 5 - Final notes

Date: 21.05.2023

Outcome:
Sound (100%)
Bug fixes (99.99999%)
Trailer (100%)
Finished build

Notes:
Looking back at the project, I had fun making it. Something about the visual programming in Unity Inspector made it much better than the usual hundreds of lines of code.
My initial approach to making this was heavily inspired by the 2DGameKit we have used previously, as I had no other Unity project to go off of,  as a baseline how are projects supposed to be built and structured. So I made a lot of unspecialized objects and scripts, that allow for customization. For example, all enemies are the same object, but by giving each of them a different set of parametrized attacks, they can behave differently (specifically ranged vs melee enemies). And these did come in handy when I moved to making the levels.
Now, as I was inexperienced with this, it is far from perfect, and I am aware that the object design could use some more time at the drawing board. Also as I realized that the deadline was closing in, and I had not made progress as fast as I had hoped, lots of the later ideas are stamps of random code that does what I needed at the moment, with disregard to the existing object design. Specifically triggers for various events, there was an attempt at making one central trigger processing script, but then the events had to be somewhere, and the easiest solution was a new script with any events I needed, because they only appeared in one moment in the game, for example. The sound clips are also tacked on objects rather haphazardly.
Let's try to find something positive... The physics work as God intended, in the end. No object can push another where they shouldn't, no objects pass through each other where they shouldn't. Although this did require the whole game to be effectively in 3D space, because CharacterController class does not have a 2D equivalent, apparently, and it was this class that had the behavior I needed, not the standard RigidBody in any of its 3 simulation types.
Now, there is CharacterController2D in the GameKit, however, I set out with a promise to make this project without blindly copying a single line of code, and copying a whole class was a bit over that, as was trying to understand what the hell was going on in there. And hey, in the end, I upheld this promise.
Also, as I mentioned in the Release log, the game is super polished. Compared to the (albeit few) other games I saw at the playtesting session, the only ones that came close to me, were puzzle games with a static camera. And those in return lacked UI. The visual sugar is my strength, and my weakness, because God knows how long did it take to get it to feel right.