Devlog: Day 4

Another productive, if only a bit too short, day.  Today was a continuation of fixing a lot of the systems in the games to making them more manageable, standardized, and extensible. Not sure I accomplished all of that completely; but the code does feel quite a bit more organized.

Overview of work for the day

Planned tasks

• Player lives handler (done) - the player now has a set of lives and when those are expended, a splash screen comes up to tell you that you are out of lives and promp to continue to the game over screen with the report card
• Integration of state machine for handling play states (done) - I put in a global state machine yesterday to handle the various menues and play selection; but the in-play handling was really kludgy; so I cleaned that up a bit
• Palette shifter for color changing between levels (done, but won't use) - the limited palette of pico 8 means there's not much flexibility in dynamically swapping in colors and it looking good. I'll go the less lazy route and do custom art for different levels

Unplanned task

• Matrix screen saver (done/prototyped) - this has nothing to do with the game; but sometimes I need to bail out of a project for a bit and tinker with an idea (gif below)
• Clean-up of the mana management (done) - I cleaned up mana management and squashed a few bugs (e.g. being able to spend into the negative pool)
• Combat animations (done-ish) - I took some time to start putting some combat animations in to give the game a bit more feel
  • mobs no longer die on contact, but bounce back and offset a bit and pause before coming back
  • character shakes one incoming damage
  • character flashes and background flashes when a life is lost
• Refactoring particle color system (done) - I'm just using pixels for particles and I had some nasty if/then nests to handle what color to make particles; and it made more sense to put that data in a nested table and call the actions once
• Iteration on the play UI to make things look a bit better(done) I fixed the formatting of the text a bit and lined things up a bit more

UI improvements

The Matrix screensaver distraction

Plan for tomorrow

Tomorrow I plan to dive into just a few more back-end items I want to fix up

Tomorrow's list

• Move player states into a new object for delivering an accurate report card at the end of the game
• Make sure particles are being flushed properly based on game state
• Look into some options for draw order so that art overlaps properly (e.g. player should be behind mobs coming from the bottom; but in from of mobs from the top)
• work on mob movement so that the juice that offsets them when they hit the player makes sure they can still be hit by the missile attacks

Ok, off to bed.