Progress Report - September 26th, 2023

Hey guys, I'm back. I got nothing witty to say to let's get into it. The changes I've made over the course of these last 22 days have been quite substantial. I have a lot more visual changes to show off than usual!

Player Statistics

 I know this is  odd addition, but I first implemented this feature to test out saving and loading data. The file used to saving stats will also be used to store more stuff like completing percentage, settings and the works. Before you get your hope up. (If you had any hopes in the first place.) I am not planning to add save points and loading to the game. I intended for the game to be played and beaten over the course of one sitting.

New Map and Tile Set Revamp

Well, it's not much of a revamp and more of a remaster of the tile set. I've changed the tile set a bit so there are a lot more pronounced outlines. That because while editing the current tile set and working on new sprites, I realized how important of  a color black is. With the self imposed limitation of the NES color palette, and with the fact that I'm not very good at pixel art in general, black is good with giving a sense of darkness and shading as well as for giving outlines. To make things more simple I decided there should be  at max, one set of wall tiles for the exterior and interior for each layer of the map. What do I mean by layer? I'll talk about that later.

Now for the new map, though it's still only temporary,  I did made it for the purpose of testing the new features. I did have fun creating it though. Especially since over the two of more months of working on the game, I've written most of the tools needed to make the process more streamlined and make changes quickly. I'm using Tiled to edit the map, but I still have to make the stuff needed to integrate it into the game. While doing it, I learned more about Tiled and adopted some principles I will use in the future.

Crates and Interactable Objects

Now for the  crowning feature of this update! Crates for were made  because I needed someway for the player to get health and armor as well as something to test the new Interactable system. Crates will be placed all around the map and will have floating above it. Once interacted with, you may receive the following things: Nothing, Health, or Armor. (Though the first option will be replaced with something else later.) Pretty easy to explain, and what you get isn't entirely random.

Information Feed

Due to my limited skill, there only so much I could do to silently convey to the player what the hell is even going on. Which is why I added an Info Feed to the game. Nothing else to say here. I could see how it would be a little annoying for some players so in the future, I'm gonna add some options to change the text size, the opacity, the spacing, and even a option to hide it all together. Hey, maybe I'll add an option to change the font for that sweet, player expression. I've been having trouble finding the right font for the feed, so hey, maybe you'll find a better once to use than me.

Keys and Gates

If you ever played an RPG Maker horror game  or literally any other video game that isn't for babies, you'd know what a key is. A locked gate and a key to open said gate  is pretty much the textbook way to halt player progression. Here it is in it's morbillionth iteration! I did decide to make a jingle play upon unlocking a gate since I figured that since gates will most likely be used as an obstacle to prevent progress. I might as well make a special sound for getting past it.

Thanks to all my efforts so far, adding stuff to the game is a lot faster! I think the time it took to implement keys to the game and give them proper functionality was somewhere above 50 minutes. Whereas implementing crates took around 9 days. Well, I had to build the system for interactable objects and create the information feed so maybe this was not the best comparison... I remember a time when making the prototype where the only things you could do is moving around and shoot stationary objects would take about 20 days. Now it's really starting to feel like a game. Hopefully development will be  much faster from here on out.

Other changes

Here are couple of smaller changes I've made that's worth mentioning. I've written some docstrings you will never see. They are for most classes and functions  and they detail what they do, their features, and what feature they will have in the future. Lastly I decided to reimplement line  of sight and have the spider use it. Yeah, there was gonna be line of sight when adding in enemies to  the game, but I decided to not do it until now.

While reimplementing line of sight, I realized how flawed this game really is, and it's not as perfect as I thought it would be. I mean, why should it be? While this isn't my first game, this is the furthest I've made it. I did gain a lot of experience and skill from this whole debacle. I think I have achieved the amount of skill that 13-15 year me would dream of, and I would be lying if I didn't take pride in that. In the future, I would probably focus on revamping the Enemy AI to be more efficient.

Video

What's next?

I'm planning on expending the map to it's final size and optimizing the game to it would handle that. After that, I'll finally implement Sub-Weapons! A core mechanic I've been waiting to add for the longest time, but I've finding more important things to do like interactable objects. I may experiment with creating effects like after-images or trails that would work well with something like Sub-Weapons or Familiars.

While I'm at it. I may try to let more people know about my game and actually try to make developer friends and try to participate in the game dev community. I don't usually do this since I don't  really have much to say at all.

Links

If you want to keep track on the games progress. You can follow the game on this website and Game Jolt. You can follow my YouTube channel and twitter as well.

Links to the game page: Itch.io, Game Jolt

Social Media: YouTube, Twitter

If you are interesting in playtesting my game, you can contact me on discord. My username is: "proarch." (With the period) 

With that, I'll see you guys later.