Week 6 Feeling Better
Aw, heck. I didn’t realize it’d been two whole weeks since my last post. My bad. At least I have a lot to show for the time!
Progress this “week” (okay, it’s been two weeks):
- Working character select screen
- Allows P1 to play as either playable character or for a second player to jump in and play as whoever P1 isn’t playing as.
- It should be modular enough to allow the addition of more playable characters without having to redo everything.
- Ripped out outline shader
- I have some currently-being-drawn sprites that need outlines only on a portion of the sprite instead of all the way around. I don’t foresee myself having outlines drawn through barriers (e.g. a wall in front of your character but you can still “see” your character through the wall via its outline) so having a shader dedicated to pixel outlines felt like wasted CPU cycles.
- Fleshed out tilemap graphics
- I learned more about Tiled terrain setup so now I have grass, dirt, water, and stone that can be drawn with Tiled terrain brushes.
- Entities can be placed via the tilemap
- This one took a while but allows me to quickly build levels without hardcoding X and Y coordinates for each entity. There’s still some work that needs to be done (X offset is a bit nasty behind the scenes and objects can’t currently stack), but I’m pretty happy!
- Moved from using
hump.camera
togamera
- This move allowed for easier camera movement that follows the player(s) and is constrained to the size of the level.
- Enemies intelligently select targets now
- This means that enemies don’t infinitely stand over the dead corpse of a player character. They’ll pick a new player to stalk once they kill their current target.
- Added small healthbars above enemies
- This really improves the quality of life of the player because it makes you feel like your attacks actually matter instead of just being soaked up by a mob.
- Objects are constrained to the visible screen now
- No more running into the abyss!
Next goals:
- I’m trying to figure out what classifies as a minimum viable product (MVP) so I can start having some people playtest. The problem is that I keep thinking of new features that I want to have in the MVP which is pretty much the opposite of what an MVP should be.
- There’s a chance that I’ll add more destructible objects to the first playable level because breaking things feels pretty good.
- Finish the tombstone skelly spawner
- Make skellies able to throw diagonally
- Tweak Lewis to make bombs more fair
- It feels like he can do too much damage too quickly
I’ve been watching a lot of the Extra Credits YouTube series lately to brush up on some gamedev topics. If you’ve never given Extra Credits some time, give it a shot! It’s very educational and entertaining even for people that aren’t developing games.