3/7-3/21: Skill Tree & Options
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates:
Skill Tree Integration (8 Hours)
I fully implemented my skill tree system that I set up a few weeks ago. When my devlog last month came out, my skill tree system had a lot of features, but I had to fully finish it and integrate it into the rest of the game. The specific issues I encountered were:
The skills could be unlocked without costing anything. The only check for whether the skill could be bought is whether the prerequisite had been purchased. I created the experience system, which consists of three scriptable objects (for each experience type) and an experience manager, which exists on the player prefab. Whenever skills are unlocked, it now actually costs the player experience.
The skills had no effect on any player abilities or stats. I fixed this in two ways: each skill can modify certain stats, and certain abilities only get unlocked when certain skills get unlocked. For instance, Agility I increases the movement speed and attack speed by a small amount, while the rest of the stats are set to 0. I also made a script that automatically manages abilities (for instance, the double jump is only enabled when “Double Jump” is unlocked.
In addition, much of my time was spent actually making the skills (creating their name, descriptions, and stats) and laying out the skill tree.
FMOD Tutorial & Audio (2 hours)
I also spent time implementing audio sliders and the skill tree sounds. Our audio middleware, FMOD, was not something I had used before, so I completed a basic YouTube tutorial to learn how FMOD and it’s unity API work. I then spent time completing two audio related tasks:
Integrating the UI sounds into the game. These include skill tree specific sounds (such as onStrengthUnlocked) and general UI sounds (such as onButtonHovered). This mainly involved figuring out how the FMOD API works and how to play single sound effects without a location.
Creating audio sliders. This mainly involved figuring out how busses work in FMOD and how the busses in this project are named. These sliders are on the options menu of the pause menu.
Pause Menu Buttons (0.5 Hours)
I implemented several buttons on the pause menu, including the Quit Game, Exit to Hub, and Exit to Main Menu buttons. Previous studio projects created this functionality, so this was mainly about reading the documentation of the WolverineSoft General Library and using their scripts to implement the buttons.
Floating Damage Text (1.5 Hours)
I implemented floating damage text. Basically, whenever an enemy takes damage, a piece of text appears in worldspace around the enemies location, displaying how much damage the enemy has taken. The main challenge of this was trying to figure out how to make the text billboard correctly (turns out, the answer was transform.LookAt).