Day 5: More Levels and Finishing Touches

With less than 8 hours to submission, I had to rush a lot of things to have a deliverable demo for the submission. The main concern was levels, UI, a win condition, and audio.

I knew I had to focus on levels, but I wanted a quick and easy win for my sanity after yesterday's fiasco, so I decided to fix the lever range issue first. At first, I added a simple BoxCollider to denote the area where the lever is interactable—only while the player is in this collider can the lever function be called.

However, this allowed for levers to be activated diagonally, which goes against the grid-like movement and alignment. So I modified it to be 4 separate box colliders instead, placed adjacent to the lever sprite.

Next priority is levels. The first few levels are simple and straightforward—walk in a line, interact with the minimally placed portals to get a good understanding of movement portal mechanics. The modular design of prefabs meant that the levels were built very quickly, and testing was quick as well. It is only when I reached the pairing pedestal mechanic that levels needed to have more thought put into them. 
I needed to keep track of which portals are static and which are affected by toggles, and have at least one path that guarantees a win at all times. With only 1 or 2 pairs of pedestals, this was easy to keep track of, but with more portals, backtracking became an issue.

Because the static and dynamic pedestal sprites were glitched, I had to manually keep track of which ones were which in my notes, which affected the speed of designing and implementing levels. At one point, I gave up on tracking entirely and just built levels using intuition, hoping that during playtesting, I would find a way (or not) to complete the level.

This was when I discovered a major issue. When playing the levels individually, there were no issues. However, when played in sequence, I discovered that the lever logic somehow carried over between levels, despite each lever GameObject and script being self-contained in each deactivated Level object when not played. This broke some levels, and I rushed to find a fix.

I was already planning to add a level reset feature for the game, so I started implementing it into the level manager. At first, I thought I could simply set every lever back to its default isRed state, and retroactively update the pedestals reflecting this change when the level is loaded. However, another unexpected bug caused it to turn all pedestals blue, even if it was set to red manually in the editor, overriding the ignoreLever condition. I spent another few hours replicating this issue across different levels, and found that there was no consistent trigger for this behaviour. With only a few hours left, I decided to reorganise the level progression and redesign the starting portal colour layouts to accommodate this bug for the demo.

In total, I only managed to implement and polish 10 playable levels. (The last one didn't make it to the final cut as there was a last-minute break when testing that made it unsolvable.)

I moved on to the starting menu UI. I wanted the game to be playable on the browser using only keyboard controls, so the UI had to be accomodated for that.

I made a very quick UI using Unity's default buttons and TMP Pro elements, taking a free retro font online, and used existing sprites as stickers and called it a day. The level manager script was expanded to accommodate the functionality of the buttons, and I got myself a simple but functional menu.

The lack of levels aside, the only thing missing was audio. I had no time to make any BGM from scratch, but I can find an audio to play when the player walks through a portal. I searched online for a free portal sound effect and updated the portal logic to play it when the player triggers the teleportation logic.

With only a few hours left for submission, I finally created the game page, compiled the build, gathered some screenshots and thumbnails for the project, and sent my submission.

The result: a very stripped-down puzzle game involving puzzles, all done within one day by a single person.