Sloped

This page is dedicated to providing a brief summary of how the game Sloped game into being. I detail the use of Vectors, Unity Menu Assets, Scriptable Objects, and UI design all down below.

A lot of this is taken from the Behance page I wrote about it which you can find here!

Gameplay

You find yourself barreling down the side of an unstable mountain trying to stay ahead of an oncoming avalanche.

Weave your way in between trees and rocks and try to survive!

Sloped is an 3D obstacle course game where you uncontrollably move forward and wave through obstacles trying to stay ahead of certain death!

Development Process

Proof of Concept

Sloped began with me testing my skills in programming C#. I had to get a simple object to move smoothly from point A to point B on an inclined plane, and have the camera follow that object.

It was rusty, but after several iterations and a lot of research on vectors, the code worked. I made a lot of adjustments for visual effects in the movements as well as speed values as they were a lot of manually-simulated forces acting on the car at all times.

The Script that controlled the movement of the car became more complex overtime, but summed up to calculating the various forces enacted on the car such as gravity, the pull downhill, player speed for forward and backward momentum, a separate player speed for sideways momentum, and more. All of this was calculated in this line of code below.

All the other movement calculations funnel through this single line of code which is a simple method summing up every Vector3 variable calculated. All the names like"speedMovement" and "gravityMovement" are Vector3 variables that apply different forces to the car.

Often these variables are zero. "strafeMovement" is zero when the player is not strafing, and "slowMovement" is zero when the player has not been hit and subsequently slowed by an obstacle.

Formation of the Final Game Loop

The game loop is as simple as getting the player car from point A to point B successfully. And as long as I could program a system that allows the player to do this over and over, and make that task somewhat challenging, I would have a successful game loop.

I will get into the replay system later in the Menu Programming section, as in development the replay system was a Reset Scene Script tied to the "R" Key. It becomes much more complex with menu programming involved.

With the movement down, the main aspect that would finalize a game loop is a challenge, and I intended to do that by adding a lot of obstacles that will slightly slow the player if not evaded in time. But to do that, I needed to program a slow mechanic.

Menu Programming

To quicken the pace of programming multiple menu windows and simplify the code a bit, I used the Unity Game Jam Menu Template package

As you can tell, I changed the visual aspect of this menu a lot, but underneath the surface, the code is mostly the same.

As you can see I changed the visual aspect of this menu a lot, but underneath the surface the code is the same.

Something I learned from this package is how to use and create scriptable objects and how they can be used to centralize your information. All the colors of fonts, buttons, and windows, all the font choices and styles, all of it stored in a single scriptable object, and if you change the information in that object, it updates the whole game. I found this to be extremely useful.

I also found this menu system very hard to work with as it involved a lot of unexplained code and methods that I needed to learn on the fly. I succeeded, but at the cost of many headaches.

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