More on the Visuals and Slightly On a Twitch Mechanic

Visuals and Responsiveness:

Player fuel gauge drains:

This week I have been working on the visuals of my dissertation and things have been working a lot better. For example, when the player is moving, there are multiple thrusters on the ship that are represented by particle systems. These change colour from yellow to red and burn out when the player is not moving. Also when the player is moving the fuel gauge fore ground blue bar drops at a noticeable rate showing the player values are dropping.

Originally I had the par pulsing between two alpha values where so the bar was slight more transparent to attract the players attention. However half of the play testers did and did not like it and one of my lecturers suggested against it, therefore I removed it from he game.

Planet resource transfer to player:

In my last blog post I mentioned when the player is receiving resources the particle system goes towards the player avatar and the HUD bars increase in width. I did the same thing with the the trader ship and play testers thought it was easy to understand, although some people though the ships needs to be a little further back from the trader ship so they can see the particles going to and from the ship. This is one of the things I will be concentrating on next week.

Player Twitch Quick Time Event:

Something I had noticed over the past several weeks but did not concentrate on because I prefer to concentrate on one thing at a time. When the player is mining a planet or trading resources at the trader ship, the transfer rate of resources takes about 7 seconds, and this is a long time for a player and they can't interact with the game when they are doing this. I had been thinking about implementing a quick time event system into the game to speed up the transfer rate if the player chooses to. After a number of play tests this thought was confirmed.

After sorting out the visuals for the transfer rates, I got to work on creating a quick time event. I started creating it myself, and I tried this using two different methods. One where the user clicks to increase a click value but when the user releases the mouse a timer makes the value decrease. This worked but dropped two quickly. Then I made the drop value lower, this worked but the planet transfer rate still stayed up after the quick time event. Then I tried making it so when the player clicks it makes the value raise but when they release instead of setting a timer to true to decrease the value the vale drops automatically. However this worked better but it still did not achieve the desired result.

After hours of struggling I decided to search the web for answers. Some one has already created some simple C# scripts for this purpose. This method seems more efficient and simple and will hopefully speed up my progress. I have implemented it into my project however I have not had the chance to use it yet. It has multiple QTE (quick time event) modes, form pressing a random button quickly to mashing a button. I plan on using the latter. Another point, the quick time event script utilises GUITextures. This means I can use  graphic to show the player which button I would like them to mash. This will do well because people have to think less with graphics and it is quicker to give players information this way due to it.

To add to the visuals I have added two items (these still need refining though). The first item is a ling cube and the second is 3D test saying "Mine Boost". When the player clicks to activate the speed boost the test is visible, also the cube increases in height so the player gets visual feedback on how effective their actions are. Also I have added a phasing drilling laser sound effect which I created using Dr Petter's program and modified the properties of it in Audacity, free audio editing soft-ware. After this I implementing it into the game onto the planet. I tried it on the player object but it did not work as well as I thought it would down to technical issues. After implementing the code this made the plater mining action more responsive because they were getting audio feedback.

Altering pitch for mining speed increase:

Along with the particles speed increasing and the other visuals to show the mining was faster I decided to raise the pitch and volume of the audio clip when the mining speed boost was active. After some experimenting I found two properties that I thought made one sound stand out from the other. This was suggested by my play testers and it confirmed my thought.

Now I just need to play test it on a few people.

I will describe the results of this in the next post since I have not had the chance to test this out.

Link to my latest build (warning the tutorial is still a bit broken but the functions sort of work, I will fix this soon):

http://www.kongregate.com/games/jinfox91/space-miner

Link to my bibliography:

http://josepheasterdissertationblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/bibliography-references.html