Reflective Post

On balance I believe this project was successful in telling a story through gameplay, asset design and the audio used. I created a successful platformer that allows the player to walk, jump, defend and collect items. On reflection there were elements that due to time constraints I wasn't able to implement and therefore I need to work on my time management skills.

Throughout this project I have learnt that I need to improve coding in C#. I have realised that when writing code I am not using the most efficient or "cleanest" statements. For example when collected items in my script, I wrote ten if statements for each heart collected. Although this worked and was simple to understand, in future I would attempt to use a loop and array to run through each statement for each count number as this would save me time overall. Unfortunately due to my limited coding knowledge there were a few aspects of the game that I couldn't get to work. This included a health bar/hurt bar that would be affected when the player would collide with an enemy, and was the main purpose of the defensive orb. However, as the main focus was on the storytelling these elements weren't necessary but this would have added to the gameplay. Therefore in future, I would set aside more time to add components that I am unfamiliar with as these are prone to more errors. 

The main issues I had with my game were using the trigger functions. In particular it seemed that although each the collectible items were assigned a tag, when referencing this in the script this didn't work properly. Therefore to get around this, I had to tag my player instead. Unfortunately although this worked for a short time in hindsight it meant that every object the player collided with, the script added one to the count for the collectible items which didn't work well with my dialogue text. Therefore in future specifically learning how to implement triggers correctly will improve my whole workflow and cause less issues. Furthermore I originally liked the idea of adding talking non playable characters so that when the player entered their collider it would begin a conversation with the character. I wanted the player to then have a choice, one being to help the character and if so was another way of collecting a heart. However unfortunately I couldn't get this to work and had to compromise. Instead I added that every time the player would collect a heart, another line of story was revealed to the player. This helped to progress the story and was easier to implement. Therefore in future I would need to look into dialogue managers and getting these to work with trigger functions. Watching more tutorials would aid my understand of this and I may be more successful in watching a Lynda or Udemy course as these tutorials go into each topic in depth.

The audio I feel is the main highlight of the game, it helps to tell the story and adds an extra layer to the gameplay. Therefore in future with more time, I would like to make a more sophisticated audio system using Wwise which would allow me to implement more realistic sounds.

Mainly I learnt through this project how to debug problems and experimenting with the code to make aspects of the game work correctly. This was successful in developing my confidence and understanding of this coding language.