A new game idea spun up by my buddy Wyatt Sniff. He had a whole game design document done for the game already. I just felt like I could add to it system wise. So we selected a start date and a Unity version. We used Github for version control and I got to work on the Main Menu.
First Problems
In the first few days we ran into a major problem that we are glad we caught so early in development. When I set up the repository it creates a .gitignore file on the main folder of the project, but if you create a new project in this folder it is new nested and this .gitignore file needs to be moved one folder down now. This was not done initially causing it to upload a library folder that should not have been there. Since it was already on the cloud it then kept pushing thousands of artifact changes to myself and Wyatt every time we opened Unity and Github. I couldnt create a backup and lost 4 to 6 hours of work, but I rather that than weeks or months due to this problem.
Main Menu
My main focus was to get the main menu up and running with a game manager that carried over the fighters and references needed for the level. There are many scripts here that work in tandem to make things work overall. The game manager as stated above, keeps things living over levels when they are loaded and keeps track of certain variables and values. The main menu script is very simple as it allows you to quit the game, or load a level. The most complex at this time is the character selector. As it swaps out icons and game objects when character selection buttons are clicked, it also stores that character ref in the game manager for level placement. There are also remnants of a two on two player mode at this time, which will be removed for simplicity at this time. The code will have to be redone as well to account for this.
Smack Studios
Wyatt had a fantastic idea. We can rig our chatgpt ai generated pictures in a rigging creator called Smack Studio. In theory, it works for us and our skill level, however in my practice, my skillset lied a little outside of what we want to have in our game. The sprites generated from the studio had artifacts in them making parts of them see through. Wyatt and I identified some of the reasons and corrected for it, but the amount of work to learn it and do it is a massive undertaking for a small project of this scale.
Fiverr Help
Instead of Smack Studio, we turned to fiverr since I've used it in the past and have had good results from it. So we spent some money where it counts to have an artist work on a character or two for us. At the moment we are working on Mop and have the intentions of doing Scrubs as well if the artist is up for it after. Later we will also find an environment artist to make a level for us with different elements. Below is a chronological picture display of what Mop has turned out to be so far.