DLOG 3: Making an Experience
- Aidan Melville
- May 24
- 4 min read
User experience is key when designing a game, from beginning to end as a designer and developer you focus your ideas around what you want to show and the experience you want to provide your players.
In Dlog 3 I will be taking you through my journey on scene management, cutscenes and UI to provide my players with the narrative and experience I wanted for Crystal Heist.
Cutscenes
Part of creating a game is the experience a player goes through, and cutscenes are a way of conveying your narrative in a guided and immersive way. I decided on having two cutscenes, one for the introduction of the game, and one for the games outro or win state.
Intro
To create my intro I used the timeline feature Unity offers, along with the animation window to create a more realistic scene. I had learned timelines fairly recently through my course in Indie Games Development at NFTS, making me feel fairly confident in the production and development of this scene.
With the theme and goal of this project being to test, build and enhance my skills I decided to take what I had learned a step further, altering particle systems, adding more animation and moving objects as well as some personality to the scene.
OUTRO
Like with the intro, I designed the outro with the thought in mind of creating an experience. I wanted to show the player having gone on a journey while they had played. The guards on the floor, the boss henchman searching before spotting the player and the player running away from the boss, trying to escape with the crystal.
Adding to this scene the ability to replay or exit the game.
Scene Management
Setting up the scenes to follow freely between each other, adding to the players experience and journey playing through Crystal Heist
Having set up a main menu, to give players the ability to chose when to interact, when to play, learn the controls and quit should they not want to proceed, I then had to tie all the scenes together into one neat package.
If you have read my previous Dlog then you will know I left out the scene load scripting, returning to the programming side I created two scene manager scripts. One that would load a scene after a delayed amount of time.
This scripted was for the intro and for the main game scene's. It allowed for smooth transitions between those scenes after cutscenes were finished and after you had completed your objective.
For the other scene, I had the player interact with a button to control the scene changes. So this script was for the main menu, allowing the player to play the game through interacting with the play button, and the other was the outro scene, which had the player click on the replay button to restart the MainScene to play through the game again.
The final result has the player load into the main menu, press play, watch the intro cutscene before playing through the level, after completing the objective, the outro cutscene plays and the player is left with buttons to decide their next move.
UI
Now comes the finishing touches. Considering the player experience, I now had to go through my main scene making sure that the player new what they could interact with, how they interact with objects, where they need to go and what needs to happen.
For this I creating three types of texts, I used the canvas system available to Unity, the types of text are:
Interactive Text - Adding text to my environment and trigger colliders so the text is not always displayed. This task was a mixture of UI and Scripting as I needed to create the text objects and set them up within the editor, then add scripts to objects like the signs and key items to make sure the text would only display to show the player they are in range to interact, and what they needed to do to interact.
Display Text - This type of text object came with it's own set of challenges.
I had to work out how to display the image object, and then also be able to disable it afterwards, while allowing the player to interact again, and making sure they knew the signs were still interactable. For the first version of my game, the signs and this type of text object was set up to display when the player was in range, and when the 'E' key was pressed, additionally I had the interact text disable, and when the player was ready, I had them press 'Q' to disable the text box, which would then reactive the interact text.
Image in game of Crystal Heist Objective Text - The last bit of text I wanted was objective text. Text I wanted to display when the objective had changed. You start off looking for the key, once you acquire it text displays telling you, you have the key, now locate and open the chest.
I came into an issue with this however as the crystal and chest overlap, which means that I decided not leave out the chest objective text for two reasons, firstly the text would clash on screen with the crystal interact text, and secondly, because the objective was clear and the crystal was in front of you.
Bringing us to the end of this Dlog, in the next and final Dlog for this journey I will be exploring the post production of Crystal Heist, and the project as a whole in reflection. Like always, thank you for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed. Do not forget to visit the download page for Crystal Heist.
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