Week 7 Almost to MVP!
It’s been three weeks since my last post. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve had enough content for a new post for the last two weeks. I put off writing this installment because it was just too darn tempting to keep pushing because I’m THIS CLOSE to a working MVP. I’ve decided it’s finally time to publish a new post even though the MVP isn’t quite ready. Hopefully there’ll be a demo next week!
Recent progress:
- Players and certain enemies now flash when they get hurt
- While entities are flashing, they can’t be hurt which helps players get out of tough situations and makes enemies harder to deal with
- Added a
Tombstone
Skelly
spawner because there needs to be a mini boss for the first level and a tombstone that spawns skeletons was “easier” to implement, feels cool, and helps set the mood of the game- As part of that, I drew up a sweet (but rough) spawn animation that I look forward to polishing
- Enemies notice you when you get close enough
- You can see the “I noticed you” exclamation marks in the GIF above
- Cleaning up stack collision checking
- Makes things more predictable and clean code makes me happy
- Skellies throw diagonally now
- Thankfully they don’t have perfect aim (I programmatically calculate an innacuracy rate for each
Skelly
)
- Thankfully they don’t have perfect aim (I programmatically calculate an innacuracy rate for each
- Player stamina (this is probably the biggest change and the most game-like thing I’ve added recently)!
- Can’t attack when stamina is low
- There’s an indicator in the
Healthbar
and a sweat icon over the player when their stamina is low
- Loot drop tables
- I also added in a
Milk
Collectible
that restores stamina
- I also added in a
- Shaking
Healthbar
when health is low- Really helps the player FEEL that they’re in trouble
- Better grass color
- Your eyes don’t bleed when you look at the grass anymore!
- Added pillars
- Just for some visual flair
- Cleaner collision filtering code
- Made a configuration that makes object immovable
- I made a lot of changes this week that push things towards more of a configuration-based setup where I don’t need custom code for each entity
Next goals:
- Start building the actual first level
- Figure out starting dialogue for the first level
- Find a way to lock framerate or perform calculations that include
dt
(delta time)- On some machines (specifically Macs) there is an issue where the game runs too quickly because the FPS isn’t locked and I calculate physics based on frame rendering instead of time passing
- Add a pickup that restores health
- Start adding more sound effects and music