Milestone 7 (Sumaiya)

Overview

This milestone focused on getting our Beta game demo ready as well as presenting it to the class. For the Beta prototype,  I developed the final boss behaviour, updated the colour mechanic to work with this new enemy, and created a working instructions menu. The feedback we received from the presentation also helped our team prioritize our efforts for the final submission. 

Final Boss Behaviour

To make the final boss more challenging to defeat than the regular enemies, I created a script to add additional behaviour to make it more powerful/difficult, which includes:

• Spawning only once all other enemies are defeated
• Teleporting every few seconds close to the player while attacking  
• Requiring more hits to be destroyed

The next step would be to make its attacks more damaging and to have it drop a crucial piece required for the final puzzle upon defeat, to strengthen the game's narrative and gameplay continuity.

Updated Colour Switching Functionality

With the final boss implemented, I updated the colour-switching system to reflect this new game state. Once all smaller enemies are cleared and the final boss spawns, the individual wand light colours/powers now dynamically "combine" into a single, unified purple hue. This visual change helps signal to the player that a new, more powerful threat has arrived

User Interface: Menu and Instructions

To enhance the game's UI, I designed new assets for the instructions panel using Adobe Illustrator, including buttons for closing the panel and navigating between pages. I then imported these assets into Unity and implemented the button functionality.

Close Button 

Back and Previous Buttons 

Implemented Instructions UI

Beta Presentation

For the Beta slides, I focused on two sections. First, I presented a development challenge I faced like the colour switching issue, and explained my approach to solving it. Second, I created the "Final Refinements" section, where I highlighted some key enhancements we plan to add for the final submission, like incorporating cutscenes and adding more sound effects.

SFX and Music

While button click sound effects have been added to the home menu, we recognize the need for more sound feedback in the Main Game. To create a more engaging experience, our team has curated a selection of sound effects and music from Pixabay and documented their potential purpose and placement. Our next step is to make the final selections and begin implementing them into the game.

Updated Trello Board

We continued to track our tasks and their states through our Trello Board. Following our Beta presentation discussion, I populated the backlog with what I believe are the remaining key tasks, ensuring we have a clear plan for the final weeks of development.

Challenges 

During the development of the Beta demo, I had two major challenges. First, the final boss script initially failed to spawn the enemy. Despite the logic being correct, the issue was traced to the boss GameObject being disabled by default; the script needed to be attached to a separate, always-active object for its Update method to trigger the spawn. Second, a script implemented to preserve home menu button states caused a conflict. Navigating from the home menu to the instructions scene and back would break the mode selection logic, preventing the correct game mode (VR or Desktop) from loading. 

Successes

The Beta presentation and demo were delivered successfully and were met with positive feedback. The insightful questions we received gave us a clear sense of priority for our final development sprints, so that our efforts are focused on the most impactful improvements for the final submission.

Hours Spent

Total Time spent: 35 hours and 45 minutes

• Final Boss Behaviour (Sumaiya): 2 hours
• Colour Switching Functionality (Sumaiya): 2 hours
• UI buttons and Instructions Integration (Sumaiya): 1 hour

• Beta Presentation Slides (All): 3 hours
• Sfx and Music Browsing (All): 4 hours

• Modelling and UV Mapping Characters (Naomi): 10 hours
• Enemy Animations (Naomi): 1 Hour
• Making and Assigning Materials (Naomi): 1 hour
• Health and Updating Enemy Models (Naomi): 2 hours
• Editing Demo Video (Naomi): 45 minutes

• Puzzle Implementation (Zineb): 1 hour
• Environment Modelling (Zineb): 2 hours
• VR controls (Zineb): 6 hours