Progress Report - November 12th, 2023

Hey guys, I'm here to drop a quick update. Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a bit of a break to rejuvenate myself. While it ain't much, I still got somethings done during the period of time.

The Changes

At best there are 3 minor things I have to show.

Enemy Rework

So I finished the enemy rework to be more efficient and made it so spiders will go to the last location they saw you if you went out of their sight. As a result of the changes, the game feels a bit more smoother. Not sure if it is a placebo effect or something. I tried running the game at an uncapped framerate and it shows to be consistently hitting 300 FPS on my computer. I don't think I've ever seen it go below 250 FPS. 

Eh, any amount of optimization is always good as they dictate what you can fit in your game. Which is something I think game developers are beginning to not care about. Sure, average computers of today are pretty powerful but still...

Screen Effects and Pre-Game Splashes.

I  decided to experiment with screen effects instead of stuff like trails of after-images. It's just a simple effect of fading the entire screen to certain color. It's ain't much, but pretty good for transitioning between scenes.

Now onto Pre-Game Splashes. Which is a term I will use to refer to the two messages that will show up on the screen, one after another when the player starts a game. The first message will actually be randomly chosen from a list, while the second message explains how to beat the game.

It's just this small that I've had in my mind for a while. I only decided to add it in after I finished the screen effects and transitions. I also think it would be a cute way to give hints to the player about certain mechanics. You could tell by some of the messages in the above image.

What's Next?

Since the next thing I'm gonna be working on will be familiars, which are entities that will follow you around, I gotta implement a pathfinding system of some kind. I do know how to implement pathfinding before, using the A* algorithm. However, that was on a smaller scale project that I worked on long before I began working on this game. 

The way I previously did it was tile based but very inefficient. It works okay in a smaller grid but I realized in a game like this, it wouldn't work out, so I thought of a different method to implement pathfinding. That method is something like AI Nodes from games that are made in the Source Engine. I do have experience in the engine so I wasn't that hard to figure the general idea of how it works. I fairly confident that this system will work, and I will be implementing a new enemy to test it along with familiars.

Links

Itch.io Page

Game Jolt Page

I'm am still looking for play testers. If you're interested, you can add me on discord. My discord username is "proarch." (With the period)

So that's all I have to say for now. Just had the post an update on what I'm doing. I'll be making more of an effort to find people to playtest my game. I'll see you guys later.