Devlog: Day 5

Day 5 of the jam was spend again on internal systems and getting stuff cleaned up. I had to spend quite a bit of time undoing some hacky spaghetti so that the code makes more sense and so that minor changes to systems doesn't involve touching so many parts of the code.

Overview of work for the day

Planned tasks

• Work on player state to better store game statistics for the mid-game and end-game report cards (done) - this was relatively easy; I just needed to create some additional data structures and do a small amount of refactoring to add the new objects.
• Make sure particles are being flushed properly so that they aren't playing after state transition (abandoned) - When I identified this problem, it was prior to the state system changes I made. The issue was fixed by the state system improvements automatically; no work needed (although I did spend too much time trying to reproduce the issue)
• Work on draw order so that enemies from the top are behind the player sprite when the get into range(not done) - I didn't have time to get to this one today; will move it forward to tomorrow
• Fixed an mob alignment issues on collision so that they don't knock themselves off path (done)

Unplanned tasks

• New art for mobs (done) I was tired of looking at my placeholder art so I created a couple of elemental skulls to fight. More enemies will be added if I have enough time over the next few days
• Worked on the level initialization to be more elegant and to initialize levels on demand rather than generating them at game start
• animation for new enemy sprites (done)
  • flipping the sprite to face the player
    • 2-frame animation
• UI improvements
  • added a drop shadow to the spell select icon
  • iterated on the Game Over report card screen

Screenshots

Plans for tomorrow

• Draw order for mobs from top of screen
• Work on level difficulty logic to have  fluid difficulty curve
• Iterate on spawning graphics (either have mobs come from offscreen [don't like this] or have a spawn animation
• create missing sounds (enemy damages player, enemy spawns, menu sounds, new game sound, life loss sound, new game sound)
• try to add some juice to enemy movement (inchworm or wobble via sinwaves)