Journal Entry 2

Date: 5/3/2024

Activity: 
- Went through 2D Gamekit tutorials
- Experimented with package features as the tutorial said
- Created a large level with two scenes (2 levels then?)

Goal:
Originally I wanted to create three scenes. A Main one that would lead into a puzzle section and unlock a door in the first that would lead to a boss.

As soon as I saw how much time it took just to make a single scene, I decided that for the sake of my sanity I would drop it down to two scenes with light platforming instead.

Notes:
I didn't know the ins and outs of the package (and still kinda don't) so I ran into a lot of problems. Most of them I managed to solve:
When you try to create a hierachy using empty objects and put things like cameras, health UI canvas or the player in them (so they are not "root" objects, most components completely break.
Related to that, I don't like how when there's an error, it just tells you which script threw it but doesn't tell you which object it was connected to. Makes debugging kinda difficult.
The basic scene template doesn't contain (as far as I can tell) an event handler thingy for UI to work. 
Some materials in the package are not compatible with default render pipeline. Had to switch their shaders to basic ones, this sorta worked (I think).
Checking out other scenes is kind of painful. Unity insists to have at least one scene open, so when I want to just quickly check say Zone1, I have to: Drop it into the window; Unload the current scene; look at what I wanted, Load the previous scene; Unload/Delete Zone1 etc... This is super annoying. Wonder if there's a better way to do this?
One thing I could not get properly working is "data persistance" - like I would have a door in Scene 1, open it then go to Scene 2, then come back and have the door be opened.
 

Invested hours: 

Total - ~14.5 hours (sheesh)
  1,5 hours spent on tutorials + experimenting
  about 3-4 hours on Scene 1
  about 3-4 hours on Scene 2
  about 2-3 hours on decorating
  rest was spent on debugging and figuring out whats wrong (there was a lot of that...)

Outcome:

Build (uploaded to the itch.io page as a .zip file)
see 1_myLevels.zip in attachements