Original date: December 27, 2021
You’re looking at the first boss design.
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Original date: December 24, 2021
There was this really annoying issue with a click-sound every time the game loaded. I’m using three separate audio buses for volume control instead of a single one, and when it switched to this setup, there was a click that was not only extremely painful for headphone users, it sounded like it could also cause damage to speakers. To circumvent it, I had to mute the buses on load and unmute them again after the switch.
I added a materialize/dematerialize animation for the player when entering and exiting a level. Won’t be doing that for teleporters though, as I feel that would interrupt the gameplay too much.
The second mission is implemented. It probably needs some optimizing/balancing, but it’s there.
Also, the player can now die.
Happy Holidays everyone.
Original date: December 20, 2021
Adjusted a few things. Changed some buttons around (save button makes no sense in the pause menu if you can’t save mid-game, but being able to access the options while playing seemed nice), added a button to reset keybinds to default and extended the options so that volume settings will no longer reset each session. Is this enough to increment the version? I guess.
The volume thing was annoying, by the way. I wrote a script that, when a volume slider is moved, transmits the new value to the audio bus to adjust the volume. When the screen is loaded, the same script will also check the volume of the audio bus and adjust the position of the slider accordingly.
There are three sliders – sfx, music and master. All of them use the exact same script (literally, they’re all linked to the same script). The script can tell which slider is calling it. For sfx and master this worked fine. But for music, whenever I moved the slider all the way to the left, meaning volume = 0, next time it loaded it would move the slider all the way to the right, to 100%. Only the slider. There was no music, so obviously the music bus volume was 0. And when checking that value, it was indeed 0. But when checking through the script, the bus was at 100%.
Got it fixed through some additional setting of the values even when it wasn’t necessary. But so strange…
Original date: December 20, 2021
Added another enemy to the game. The Lurspike is just a variation of the Lurker, but it has different armaments and a little twist to its behaviour.
Also managed to clear out a few bugs and managed to confirm that the exports run on Linux. So that’s good to know.
Original post: December 19, 2021
Here’s some ingame footage for you, and a render of the Wraith, just for fun.
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Yesterday I spent most of the time changing the buttons in the UI because, let’s be honest, they looked awful and didn’t really fit in. Also, having a disproportionate focus frame appear around a button once you clicked it, yeah, I hate that in Windows and hated it even more in the game.
The new buttons look fine and they light up when you click them. Had to make them multiple sizes because I didn’t want to remake all the windows, but it’s ok.
Also started working on the minimap, which I was able to finish today.
Positioned roughly in the center of the HUD, the minimap shows the current room in the center and 8 rooms (if present) surrounding it. Rooms not visited before will become visible the first time the player enters them. This is exactly how the minimap worked in ShadowWraith and I saw no reason to change that.
I will have to manually create each minimap as well as the parts to cover it, but the game determines on its own which minimap it has to load in at which time.
At this point I could actually put together a demo, which is my plan during Christmas leave.
Original date: December 18, 2021
Aaand another one. Fixed Cursor’s behaviour. It now has a limited turn speed.
Just messing around here. The Cursor in this video had its maximum rotational speed reduced to about half. It doesn’t seem to be happy with it…
Original post: December 18, 2021
Okay, so I figured out how to work around the display issue. I need to et HiDPI to true, and if the player has their UI scale set to anything other than 100%, they may need to right-click the game executable, select Properties, go to the Compatibility tab, click “change high DPI settings”, check “override high DPI scaling behaviour” and set it to “application”. That goes right into the readme.
In other news, more importantly, keybinds. The game was originally set to control the ship with the numpad and shoot with the space bar. It’s how most topdown games I played in my childhood, on Mac and on DOS/Windows, controlled. However nowadays that’s apparently strange and players may want to control the ship with the left hand. So we now have adjustable keybinds. I planned on introducing that later anyway, but it was pretty much the first thing that was mentioned during playtest, and it’s an easy fix, so…
I’m planning on adding gamepad support as well, however, my tests so far weren’t very satisfying. To me controlling the ship with the gamepad feels incredibly awkward.
Oh, and we also have volume control now. Yay.
Original date: December 17, 2021
To be able to test a couple of things, I built what will be the game’s first level. It’s fully functional and playable, but I won’t be sharing it just yet. There’s a couple of issues that need addressing.
The game is currently designed to run at a resolution of 1920×1080. If it’s launched on a monitor with a different resolution, it should scale, but if it does, it looks rather ugly. Imagine trying to resize an image with MS Paint. Yeah, that.
The other thing is, if you have your Windows set to scale text, icons, UI elements and stuff, because maybe you have a small, high resolution screen, or your eyes simply aren’t good enough and you have trouble reading small text, you can’t play the game until you reset your scale to 100%. Anything above that and there will be issues like the clickable areas of menu buttons not aligning with the corresponding button graphics, or accidentally clicking outside the window even though it looked like you were clicking inside of it.
Basically the window and all the elements in it will be at 75% your screen size, even though it LOOKS like 100%.
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Added 3 enemies to the game.
1) The Lurker finally has behaviour and can do more than hover in place and die when hit. Not that much more, but it’s something.
2) This is the Cursor. Right now I’m not completely happy with its movement model, I need to work on that.
3) I probably got a bit carried away with Gadian’s design. I think it looks cool and I enjoyed modelling it, but on a 96×96 pixel top view sprite you’re not really going to see a lot of it. Ah well.
