Revision A (isn't a thing...yet, BUT...)

While By Design is kind of generally complete, there are a few tweaks I want to make to it. I wanted to make sure I had this thing in a postable state not only by the jam deadline, but ideally so ahead of the deadline that I could shift focus back to other projects, so there are a few cleanups which I could have implemented, but chose not to. Not major game-changing alterations, but little things that really just personally bug me a bit, but not so significant as to detract too much from the core experience.

(Okay, there's one thing, but I'll get to that...)

The one person to download the project folder so far (😊) may have seen this already, but getting under the hood, there is no real correlation between the player character's depleting health bar and the "life essences" that are seen to emerge from them - any correlation is all video game smoke and mirrors. How this is displayed visually is with two projectile types: one with no collision info which launches from the player and travels along one of sixteen possible trajectories for a set distance, before an invisible Actor (GB Studio term for a game object, basically) gets placed somewhere along that trajectory and becoming the spawn point for the second projectile type; one with no movement info but which can collide with the Player - this is the actual Health pickup. The code for when the Player collides with this type resets the Player Health variable to max as well as resetting the Health Bar animation back to its start, ie full health.

Almost all of this works exactly as intended but there are a couple of fixes I'd like to make. One, the "escaping essence" projectile always travels the maximum distance a health pickup could appear at, meanwhile the pickup itself can appear at one of three set points along that trajectory, ie different distances from the player. This looks a little odd most of the time when the essence escapes but the Health pickup spawns in at a point that isn't the maximum distance away. I should be able to fix how this looks by tweaking the speed value of that projectile type so it doesn't travel so far within its designated lifetime (there may need to be tweaks to the lifetime values as well, but I'll feel that one out as I go).

The other fix actually affects gameplay, and that's in the event a Health pickup spawns in and the safe zone shrinks before the player has picked it up. Under the hood, the play area doesn't actually shrink at all, but rather the background image is a row of different play screens depicting smaller and smaller safe zones, with the "camera" pointed at the first one, then periodically moving one whole screen's worth to the right, to the next smaller one. Checks are made under the hood to move the player along as well, then check if their new position puts them out of bounds or not - Game Over if they are. Here's the thing: if a Health pickup had been spawned in on the Camera's previous position, it doesn't carry over to the new position. This is to be expected, as that info wasn't given in the code, but curiously the projectile has been appearing still in the new Camera position, just in some seemingly random placement. I'm not sure how that's happening, although as much as I'd like to fix that just to clean that element up, that's not the bit I'm after fixing at the moment.

The bit I'd like to fix is having the Health pickup appear to remain in the same location (the "same location"), giving the player a chance to still pick it up. I tested a fix for this during the original development by having a second invisible  Actor work offscreen to place a second Health pickup exactly one screen over from where the "original" Health pickup would drop in every instance. This didn't work at all, so I removed it outright... for now. If I can figure this one out, I'm putting it right back in 🤔

There's one more miniscule adjustment which I've already added to the project (not the version available for download at this time) which absolutely affects nothing, but hey, it makes me happy, so 🤷

I added drop shadow to the guitar tab Easter egg scene*

* wait, the what now? 🤨😐🤫