Rebuilding

Hello again everyone! It's a much better post this week after the disaster of last Sunday. As you are probably aware, the Unity project corrupted for reasons unknown. I have been able to recover the assets after much annoyance but the problems had not all been solved.

New Project
In the last post, I mentioned that I had not tried to load the project after the recovery. I have since done this and what a surprise it was still corrupted. I decided that rather than spend an age finding out what was wrong I would just copy the assets over to a clean Unity project. To stay on the safe side, I tried to backup the recovered project before moving things to a new one. However, I could not move or copy the folders. There was no explanation or error, they just wouldn't budge. On the bright side, the only folder that I could do anything with was the assets folder. I concluded that it was not my files that were causing the corruption and it must be something on Unity's end. So I moved the assets one by one into a new Unity project. To kill two birds with one stone, I made sure it was the latest version of Unity because I have been using a slightly older version for some time.
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Reassign, Rename, Rejig
The only downside to moving everything to a new project is that I had to plug in all of the, now empty, script variables again that had not been turned into prefabs. I also had to recreate the level editor scene as it had not survived the move. I actually intend to move the level editor and its assets to a separate Unity project as this will drastically decrease the file size game. Another asset that did not survive was the design for the new level I had just finished. Luckily, I have an older version of that which I will have to rebuild the end product from.

Improvements
The newer version of Unity brought a few issues with it. The lighting intensity values have been tweaked quite drastically. When I first loaded the shark level, it seemed to still be corrupted as everything was white. Turns out the lights I use for the furnace were completely over exposing the scene. So I thought I should take the opportunity to improve the furnace. I've improved the particle movement, tweaked the lighting, and added a fake light in the form of a sprite to increase the look of heat. I am also now using particle force fields, which are great fun to mess around with.

Turning up the Heat
There are a couple of things I have added to the game since the last proper post. I have worked on a large part of the environment, the pipes. Until now, the pipes have been using an existing tile set, which to be honest doesn't look like pipes. I took it upon myself to make something a little more suitable and have implemented it. I have also connected them to the furnace, so whenever the furnace is active the pipes will be hot and will kill the player on contact. This gives the player another reason to infest the sharks because they are resistant to the heat. Obviously they can't survive in the furnace, or at least they won't when I finish coding it. I haven't finished them yet, so apart from looking hot they are harmless.

I think that is everything. The corruption conundrum threw me out of kilter big time so I may have missed something. I hope you like how things are looking now and I'll have more exciting things to talk about next week!