Child of Norn
Availability:
Itch.io: May 14th, 2021
Description: A game about the child of prophecy, who is destined to save the world, with the help of a legendary, magical axe.
Made With: Unity
Development Time: 8 months
Team Size: 5
Role: Lead Programmer
Singleton and DontDestroyOnLoad
Save and Load System
Audio Control and Sliders
Programming for Child of Norn - Summary
Throughout the courses I have taken, many valuable lessons were learned. Some of those lessons deemed itself beneficial to the I development of my capstone. The lessons learned enabled me to apply the right programming that I was looking for in the game. The first notable enhancement was the usage of a proper singleton and DontDestroyOnLoad. They gave the ability to keep persistent data throughout the game as well as be called from any script anywhere in the project. This gave way for implementing item persistence and a functional save and load system.
A functional save and load system brought great results for the game. This feature would allow for the player to store all of the progress that they have accomplished throughout their play through. If the player would exit the game and begin to play it again at another time; the next time they started the game their progress would have been saved and they would be where they left off. Having the Game Controller be a singleton allowed for various values to be stored into a serializable script which would then be saved into a binary encrypted file.
A functional save and load system brought great results for the game. This feature would allow for the player to store all of the progress that they have accomplished throughout their play through. If the player would exit the game and begin to play it again at another time; the next time they started the game their progress would have been saved and they would be where they left off. Having the Game Controller be a singleton allowed for various values to be stored into a serializable script which would then be saved into a binary encrypted file.
Lastly, I was able to learn how to control the audio for different sound categories through programming. This gave us the ability to control all of the audio from one screen in any of the levels. All of the audio was converted using logarithmic functions due to the fact that audio is read in decibels. With the audio being converted using a logarithmic function it was able to present the volume values as whole numbers for the player to understand while using the audio sliders. The audio volume values were also stored into a unity built in save function called PlayerPrefs. PlayerPrefs are able to store any of the information you tell it too and be able to retain it for the next time the player loads the game. PlayerPrefs work similarly to that of a save file, but the main difference is that they lack the security that the save and load system gives the stored data.
Overall many useful lessons were taught throughout the courses. The ones that were most beneficial played an important role in my game. It allowed me to advance in the development of the game. The most helpful lesson of them all was learning about how to us a singleton and DontDestroyOnLoad. This is one of the main programming skills that brought the game to be developed exactly as intended.
