Devlog 4: Polish and UI

This week was focussed on cleaning up. The biggest quality-of-life feature was building out a prefab system for key scene management stuff. I made PlayerSpawn, FallCatch, SceneSwitcher, and Backtrack objects, all set up so I can just drag them into new levels and not have to re-code any logic. It’s boring under the hood but saves so much time later when working with a large amount of levels.

The FallCatch kicks the player back to the start of the level if they fall off-screen (so no more getting lost in the void), the Backtrack block is just a box collider to stop them from reversing into a level they already finished, and the SceneSwitcher warps them to the next scene when they reach the end. All really simple stuff, but now every level feels more like a real place instead of just a test box.

Player falling and Respawning

Player attempting to backtrack

Player progressing to the next level

Also started testing music in the game! Still deciding what direction I want to go, but I’ve got a persistent music system working using a DontDestroyOnLoad object with an Audio Source set to Play on Awake. It keeps playing across scene changes with no hiccups, which is honestly a big win. I also fixed a bug where the player would stick to walls, but now with two trigger colliders either left or right of the player, we can now detect if the player is actually ground and stop them from sticking to walls.