Journal Entry 1

Date: 9.4.2021

This is the game design I received:

At first sight the design looks quite complicated and I think this level will take a player more time to complete then 3 minutes. However it appears the original author put a lot of thought into this design and the level looks really good. I like the idea of player having to make a decision which way he'll go in the middle room. Icons make objects easily distinguishable but connecting portals, switches and doors with just a number is very confusing,

After observing the level I can see this level work well even without a need to collect keys. So that will be a feature I implement last if there will be enough time remaining.

I had to install new version of Unity for 2D game kit few weeks ago. And now it requires a different one, which will take an hour to install again? 🤦‍♂️ 
It took well over 2 hours, I will continue some other day.

Date: 11.4.202
2D Game Kit took 30 minutes to load, so far I have only negative experience with Unity and my laptop isn't even that old...

After it finished loading I set up a new scene and removed all of its background assets as I don't think they will fit my level quite well. I wanted to save the project and it took me a while to figure out I have to exit Unity for the project to ask me to be saved. File > Save or any other buttons in there didn't work, that's not very user friendly.

I can finally start working on the level. I didn't like the provided pallete of two blocks to draw tiles with. I noticed there are a lot of different tile assets in the Game Kit's folder, it took me a pretty long time but I figured out how to add them to Tile Editor. Who would guess you can just drag them to Tile Editor Window... (:

I started working on first room of the level, laid out walls, acid and moving platforms. I had some isues with config resetting to original values. After placing enemy it doesn't want to render when I start the game. 

I will not be uploading build this week as it's not worth it yet, I will leave a screenshot of the scene below.

Outcome:

To sum up my feelings for this week, I'm really annoyed by slowness of Unity and how it kept resetting my work. Despite the setbacks I managed to almost finish first room and refreshed my knowledge of how to work with Unity.

Invested hours:
Installations and loading times: 3+ hours 
Studying level design + designing level in Unity: 3 hours