Develop Route

The game start with the prototype level. I break down the level with 2 major parts: Upper for the road and lower for the panel.

The road consist of multiple parts – the car that out of control, 2 different victim groups, score board and time and health point indicator. Above all that I start with the simplest one: build up the road. From the assets I found many tiles representing the road. But what should a road look like near the traffic light? A common sense now becomes a problem. I search for images for roads and make one eventually. The road are divided by a solid line to tell the players that they have 2 choices in the level. And the car is guided by dotted line. And all line meet with zebra crossing in the end, where I’ll put subjects.

Then the car’s animation are also a problem that I wish to make a brake marks in the end. But it did not go well and there are no clear tutorial on specific questions like this. So I have to compromise. I used the simplest animation driven only by scripts that the car will go straight towards targets. Normally it is the end of the road, and occasionally it is the upper group.

In building up the tension, I use the DoTween plugin to control the car’s speed. I wish to leave the impression that in the beginning of the level, player would notice that the car is moving fast. And then they will get busy reading documents and leave scores. So I set the car start fast and end in slow speed.

Now let’s have a look at the lower panel that show information. The portrait panel have actually only one valid info – the subject’s gender. But it doesn’t matter because it does not affect the final answer. Then why it have 1/3 space? I wish players to look into each subject’s eyes when they make decisions. That make player believe that all subjects are real and looking at you when you rate them. The impression can raise player’s consciousness about what they are doing – judge people with their life at stake.

Thanks Tomat for the Face generator program, In his blog he allowed developer to use this to generate random profile and mention him in credits. His work really helps me with faces and names of each subject. Many thanks to him and there is his blog:https://www.tamats.com/blog/?p=814

Then is the middle and largest panel, information panel. It convey the most dense level of information but still rather simple – name, age, job and external description. Age, job and description will directly affect the answer. In the next devlog I will introduce this as the level design part. Lastly there’s assessment panel.

Then there are interaction section between two parts – subject groups and total score slot.

The basic procedure is like this: player click on a certain subject, the panel shows his personal information and then player rate him or her. Final step is to add up all scores and shows it in the proper slot. Describe this are simple, but to achieve it is quite hard for me at the very start.

After days and days of programming and learning C# in Unity. I accomplished all functions need above and the first version of layout are like this.

Then the first challenge comes up: Textbox. The FMP is a text-heavy game that almost all the settings and plots will show in text. So I want that when textbox is on, all other stuff will stop and wait for its end. That stumped and frustrated me very much. I don’t know how to do it and not sure which function will suit all my demands. I don’t want to crash my codes all over in the future. Then all I can do is to think while scanning all tutorial related.

The answer narrows down to a function called Coroutine in unity. For Unity it only support single thread running. If developers want to let some function running and others to stop without setting the timescale to zero, they will use Coroutine. And thank god it can help with almost every aspect with my FMP, and later on I learn from various tutorials to get a better understanding. I googled a lot and all its APIs, it works. And that’s basically how the first prototype begin.