Improve My Wenk!

Hi there.

This weekend we participated in Improve My Game Jam #6 and we updated our weird game Wenk!. https://cbellino.itch.io/wenk
We didn't plan what we wanted to do at all so it went in all directions as you will see below. Nonetheless it was fun to play around with an old project and we might do it again :)

New features:

• Added a new level.
• Added gamepad support.
• Upgraded the tileset of the dungeon to be a little cleaner and easier to use for us when we build the levels (it's waaaaay easier now).
• Added some random variants to the ground and walls.
• Forgot to use the random variants to the ground and walls in the levels...
• Added some particle effects when the player and enemies get hit or killed. Those are placeholder, we still need to make our own in our pixel art style.
• Adjusted the movement, projectile speed, rate of fire so the gameplay will feel less sluggish. It's still not where we wanted it to be though.

What we built but didn't get to use in game (yet):

• Added alternate sprite for a smaller penguin (named Mini Wenk). Not sure what we are going to use it for yet haha.
• Added a Stats system that manage the damage, health, speed, attack patterns of player enemies. For examples, we can now easily spawn enemies shooting 2 projectiles on all cardinal directions. But we didn't publish these levels yet.
• Experimented with extending on the sacrifice feature to affect stats also. We want every stats like health/damage/etc to be equipped/removed like pieces of equipment or gems in RPGs. This way if you equip 3xHP and 1xDMG, you will start with these and would have to sacrifice one of there to advance to the next dungeon.
• Speaking of dungeons, we moved from single room floors to multi rooms dungeons (top down zeldas' style, with locked doors, screen transitions, etc) in our dev branch. We didn't get the time to finish it for this jam but it's here. 
• We started to play around with the idea of having dungeons have different themes (dungeon, forest, mountain, etc).
• So yeah, we started too much stuff and finished almost nothing. Lesson learned...

Miscellaneous:

• We added our names in the credits, on the game's page and the build. 💖
• We cleaned up a LOT of throwaway code that we built during the initial Ludum Dare.
• A lot of but fixes (most of them on code we added during this jam haha).
• We recorded everything so we could create a timelapse video (i'll post un update on the game's page when it's done).
• We wrote this post mortem :)

We wanted to use some of the new tools available in Unity and just do some things right because we lacked the time during the Ludum Dare. Anyways, here here is what we changed for the technical stuff:

- Unity 2020: The latest alpha came out the day before the jam so of course we had to update and beta test during a game jam with limited time! Joking aside, the previous alphas/betas have been pretty stable for the most part to i felt confident that we could upgrade. 
- Tilemaps: Use the Rule tile from the 2d extras package to paint our walls / ground and random decoration easily.
- Inputs: Replace our old input code by the new Input System. It's way easier to manage once you get the hang of it. This is why we could add gamepad support easily.
- Addressables: We reworked the way we load our rooms and levels and i wanted to try out the new addressables system to load / unload scenes. While we had some issue at the end with the build/packaging, the scene management is quite easy as you can see here.
- URP: Since we migrated the project to Unity 2020, i wanted to see how hard it would be to migrate a simple 2d game to use the new Universal Render Pipeline. The only thing we had to change was the Color Sacrifice that i was easily updated. Code here.
- Extenject: We already used dependency injection in the base game but it came in last minute and wasn't well integrated with all the systems. It's still not good enough for a serious game of course, but it's slowly getting there.
- Unit tests: Yeah i know, unit tests during a game jam... But when i write isolated systems it's often easier for me to write the test/interfaces first to keep what i'm trying to do in mind. You won't find a lot of unit tests in the code (yet), since i only spent like an hour on them and it was on a system that went unused anyways. Code here.