Postmortem

Backpacking

What is it:

Backpacking is a top down 2D RPG-Adventure game. In this game you play as a character who needs to run around town, interacting with your wild neighbors and hoarding weapons in your backpack all for the sake of getting your 10 bucks back from the wacky Bernie Gang.

What I Did:

I worked on this game in a 5 person cross disciplinary team. I focused on player movement, the dialogue system, and scripted events. I also learned how to create pixel art and created the tile sets for the environments and buildings along with the non-human character art.

Challenges and Solutions:

Our player movement script needed to be hooked up to allow for convincing multi-directional movement with child objects that would change sorting layers. I ended up using animation states that changed dependent on input.

We decided early on in development to keep the whole game world in one scene to reduce loading. To do so, I created portals that would transport the player without reloading the scene and would disable demanding effects when they were not needed.

We also used a template scene for battles where we would pass through player and enemy data. I implemented a scrolling menu for when the player gets more than 4 weapons and wrote a sinusoidal distortion shader to make our battle backgrounds stand out.

What's Missing / Lessons Learned:

We had issues with some of our early progress checks which would move the player back and trigger dialogue when a condition had not been met. If the player would continue trying to move in that direction right before the dialogue appeared, they could get stuck and it would take to long for the player to be pushed away. With more time I could have fixed this by handling the push-back with events that occurs once dialogue ends instead.