Devlog: Day 7

After doing lots of tweaks today, I felt it was time to get the game in front of people for a couple of days of feedback that can go into the final product that is due in 48 hours from this post.

Beta playable here!

Overview of work for the day

Today was a lot of random items with no real structure. Rather than following a plan too closely, I just followed my ideas a bit into a pattern of randomness that resulted in some planned things not done, but definitely some unplanned stuff I might have missed otherwise.

Planned Tasks

• Add missing sound effects for current features (incomplete) - I added a new sound for mob spawns that really does improve the feel of the flow of the game in-play; but I still need menu noises, player pain/death noises to have this completed
• Internal systems refactoring (iterated) - I cleaned up quite a bit of code yet again; not much time spent here, but the project is big enough that having readable code is important; especially since I'm using the built-in editor. Having 32 characters by 23-1/2 characters resolution makes an old coder like me who's used to having >200 x 85 resolution  of visible code not be able to see the whole concept of a function without doing a LOT of scrolling
• Idle and attack animations for the player (done) - I really like how it turned out too!
• Draw order system (still undone) - I didn't get this but I do now how I will manage it without having to loop through object tables twice. While I shouldn't care about that given the size of the game, I just feel the need to do this a bit better and less kludgy

Unplanned tasks

• Spawn pads (done) - I created animated spawn pads for the enemies that help make the mobs origins feel better to the player. Rather than having unending coridors for them to come from nowhere, they are being teleported direction into the chamber you are in
• Sprite sheet overhaul (done) - I had way to many test graphics on the first tab of the sprite sheet and it I was having a hard time with getting to needed sprites and adding additional frames to existing sprites; so I moved all of my test graphics that I'm not currently using to deeper tabs so I could have my used sprites accessible
• Updates to particles (done) - I went from pixels as particles to rectangles; this allows me to still do cheap particles without sprites, but have some flexibility
• Wait state on interim windows (done) - I added a wait mechanic to end of level, end of game screens so that a player mashing buttons doesn't accidentally advance screens prematurely
• Playable beta published (done) - A friend was excited about the combat gif I sent him and really wanted to try the game out; so I published a beta version here on Itch. I posted it to twitter as well as the Level-up Circle Discord server, so hopefully I get some good input.
• Timelapse recording (trialed) - I have wanted to take a look at ShareX for a while as a tool for taking screenshots on a schedule that could be turned into a timelapse for post-project post mortems. See below for results of a few hours of recording today.

Media

Time-lapse experiment

Plan for tomorrow

• Add remaining needed sounds
• Review feedback from play testing and figure what can be added
• Add a recipe system to level creation to help with procedural addition of new components
• Add power-up/replenishments as an added gameplay mechanic
• Work on balancing the mana system
• Iterate on the High score saving system
• Make all non-gameplay screens more grahical (and not just text on a plain background)

Time for rest...