Dreadhalls, the Tumble Update

Objectives

  • Read and understand all of the Dreadhalls source code from Lecture 9.
  • Spawn holes in the floor of the maze that the player can fall through (but not too many; just three or four per maze is probably sufficient, depending on maze size).
  • When the player falls through any holes, transition to a “Game Over” screen similar to the Title Screen, implemented as a separate scene. When the player presses “Enter” in the “Game Over” scene, they should be brought back to the title.
  • Add a Text label to the Play scene that keeps track of which maze they’re in, incrementing each time they progress to the next maze. This can be implemented as a static variable, but it should be reset to 0 if they get a Game Over.

Getting Started

Download the distro code for your game from cdn.cs50.net/games/2020/fall/assignments/9/assignment9.zip and unzip assignment9.zip, which should yield a directory called assignment9.

Then, in a terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities on Mac or by typing cmd in the Windows task bar), move to the directory where you extracted assignment9 (recall that the cd command can change your current directory), and run

cd assignment9

Falls in the Halls

Though Unity may seem daunting at first, you’re probably finding your way around the software more easily this time around. This week’s assignment is fairly simple, but it will require you to get involved with scenes, part of the dungeon generation, and more; however, this and next week’s assignment will be rather light compared to prior assignments so that you have more time to focus on your final project.

Specification

  • Spawn holes in the floor of the maze that the player can fall through (but not too many; just three or four per maze is probably sufficient, depending on maze size). This should be very easy and only a few lines of code. The LevelGenerator script will be the place to look here; we aren’t keeping track of floors or ceilings in the actual maze data being generated, so best to take a look at where the blocks are being insantiated (using the comments to help find!).
  • When the player falls through any holes, transition to a “Game Over” screen similar to the Title Screen, implemented as a separate scene. When the player presses “Enter” in the “Game Over” scene, they should be brought back to the title. Recall which part of a Unity GameObject maintains control over its position, rotation, and scale? This will be the key to testing for a game over; identify which axis in Unity is up and down in our game world, and then simply check whether our character controller has gone below some given amount (lower than the ceiling block, presumably). Another fairly easy piece to put together, though you should probably create a MonoBehaviour for this one (something like DespawnOnHeight)! The “Game Over” scene that you should transition to can effectively be a copy of the Title scene, just with different wording for the Text labels. Do note that transitioning from the Play to the Game Over and then to the Title will result in the Play scene’s music overlapping with the Title scene’s music, since the Play scene’s music is set to never destroy on load; therefore, how can we go about destroying the audio source object (named WhisperSource) at the right time to avoid the overlap?
  • Add a Text label to the Play scene that keeps track of which maze they’re in, incrementing each time they progress to the next maze. This can be implemented as a static variable, but it should be reset to 0 if they get a Game Over. This one should be fairly easy and can be accomplished using static variables; recall that they don’t reset on scene reload. Where might be a good place to store it?

Errata

NONE

How to Submit

If you don’t already have it installed, install submit50 by running pip3 install submit50. Then, execute the below, logging in with your GitHub username and password when prompted. For security, you’ll see asterisks (*) instead of the actual characters in your password.

submit50 games50/assignments/2020/fall/dreadhalls