This game is getting much, much closer to finished. We’re in the “final 90%” now. I’ve not been able to update this devlog for a while as I’ve been moving faster the last several weeks, and had life to take care of as well. Let me jump back in with what I’m working on as of this week.

Before I worked on any code or anything else in the Unity project, I made a couple test builds, and found that the game had grown to nearly 1GB, up from about 100MB a couple months ago. Since I want this to be a web game, that won’t work. In fact it’s over all the file size limits for Itch, and for no good reason at that. I think it's something to do with having a video player in the framework, moreso than the video files themselves.

So I clipped the video to exactly the segments I was going to use  & re-encoded them down to about 30MB total, but the game itself was still ~300MB. I found this to be coming from the Unity frameworks.

Even a web build came out to 100MB, which has me wondering what it leaves out that a desktop build doesn’t. Chalk it up to inexperience.

For the rest of the day here’s what I worked on:

– Fixed startup pellet count issue. game pellets were being counted in start corridor and carried over to level 1
– Fixed UI display over scare vid
– Updated tunnel scene
– Added new camera controller functionality, moving and refining from PacMan script
– Began switching to in-game VFX over video due to game size bloat.

I already started designing a sort of 2d corridor that has a 3d perspective look to it. Very simple but enough to work with the game’s graphics.

To make the effect I scripted movement on the sprites. I divided them into group A (currently blue in color) & group B (currently red). Group B moves back and forth, and blinks in and out. After playing with the timing, I made group A blink out also, but stay solid longer.  Lastly there is a particle emitter shooting out from the center where an orb (a circle) is located.  Together it makes a flashing tunnel-like effect.

The rest of the work was around the timing of all these elements, which at this point I think makes a smooth transition, and communicates what I want the start of the game to do. You’re in a corridor, traveling down towards “something” and as you get closer to it you get what I’m calling visions. These visions will continue as you play the main game, ultimately leading to the endgame.