Breaking the Coding Wall: The Fully Coded Build

Trial, error, and extraneous troubleshooting led us to this point. Thanks to the mentoring of a couple experienced coders, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can confidently say that I have completed the framework for a completely functional and malleable gameplay experience.

In the video displayed, we can see that we have a fully functioning main menu with a start button, an options menu, and a two step quit button. This scripted menu layout was created by slightly modifying the unity store asset “Main menu with Parallax Effect” by SirLink (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/83876).

When in game, pressing the “P” key will bring up the in-game menu. This menu will enable the ability to either quit to the main menu, restart the level to start again, or close the in-game menu and resume playing without the interface.

As for the game objective mechanics, there was a plethora of scripts that I had to write from scratch to make the economic tracking work, to control the events of differently scored outcomes, and make each script coherently communicate to each other to make use of specific information. Thinking back to it now, I can’t entirely remember how I did it all, and I’m quite amazed that the entire thing works at all.

As for the specifics, the GUI has a money counter, a civilian-conversion counter, and a total-amount-of-civilians-left counter. The money allows the player to see how much the player gains from the rich and whether they have enough to give to the poor. The civilian-conversion counter is essentially the high score, and is what gets ranked at the end. The total-amount-of-civilians-left counter, along with the intended function in its name, also indicates how close the game is to finishing. When the counter hits 0, it’s game over, and you’re ranked on your final score.

From this point on, our team can now work on building the levels, finishing up assets, and working towards the last few touches to really flesh out the game. We’re currently in the works of making an opening cut scene, creating fully rigged models of each character, and finishing the city building models.