November round up!

Hello everyone!

Although a little late, here's the usual monthly update, focused on The Gate.

I've been working hard lately to try to complete the game as quickly as possible, but during October I was busy harvesting olives.

After the harvest, at the end of October, I got right back to work, and here's a list of what I did.

The map: How are we doing??

I've completed rooms 17, room 18, and I've almost completed room 19.

Room 19 is taking up a lot of my time because it contains the first boss Kal will have to face.

The most time-consuming part is creating the graphics: I'm very slow, I'm not a pixel artist but I'm picky, so I spend a lot of time trying to draw the graphics as best as possible.

I'll show you a snippet of the map where the first boss will be located:

No boss images! It's top secret!

BACKGROUND MUSIC

I've started experimenting with background music using small sampled clips: this allows me to use just 1 or 2 audio channels, leaving the others free for sound effects.

I'm doing my best to save as much Chip RAM as possible, i think I'll need to sample clips for 3 or 4 chords songs with additional variations to avoid boring and too repetitive music.

As I said I started to experiment: in room 18 I used a mod with sampled music and it uses 2 channels, there are not too much variations and it weights 90Kb for around 1 minute of looping music.

It was a pretty quick experiment but I think it's a good solution: here is a short video with the music I was talking about:

For music creation, I use a Yamaha MOX6 workstation.

It's pretty old, but I find it excellent, both for its sounds and its sequencer, which is very reminiscent of Amiga trackers!

Look how beautiful this keyboard is!

JUMP HIGHER KAL!

In room 19 there are some platforms to jump on, but I realized that with Kal sprite's height, I needed to make him jump higher so I added more jump frames and I increased the maximum jump height: consequently also the jump width has increased too.

You can see the current jumping animation in the video where I was talking about the background music.

MORE AMBIENCE EFFECTS

To raise tension in some areas, I thought to add a few simple effects that, hopefully, help for a deeper player's immersion in the game world.

Here is a list:

• COLOR CYCLING I added support fot the classic color cycling animation, this effect has the following parameters:
  • Sspeed : The effect's speed
  • Forward : Specify if the cycling moves forward or backward
  • First Index : First color index to cycle
  • Last Index : Last color index to cycle
• PALETTE GLITCH The palette glitch effect is particularly suited to simulate almost broken neon lights, it derives a second palette and use both the original and the derived one to create the effect, switching the palette randomly. The effects parameters are:
  • Delta : a value to subtract or to add to the original palette colors in order to create a secondary palette. Frequency : A value that determines the palette switch frequency
  • Update_cycle : This value sets the amount of rendering cycles to skip before checking if we have to switch the palette.
  • Min_duration : I can set here the minimum duration of a palette swap so that I can avoid to much flashy changes.
  • Start : This flag determines if the effect should be started as soon as the map has been loaded or not.

• COLOR FLASH This effect is used to define one or more color indexes to flash/fade (max 8 entries). With this effect I can easily set up one or more color index to change smoothly their colors.
• CUSTOM PALETTE Finally this effect allow me to setup several palettes and switch to them manually. For example, after a certain action, I could set up a red-based palette to simulate that an alarm has been triggered.

All of the listed effects can be manipulated via scripts (dialogues, terminals and eventually triggers).

PRINT FROM THAT TERMINAL, KAL!

Terminals are filled with documents and stuff to read, some documents may hold important informations that could help Kal to proceed in his adventure so i thought to add a function to print a terminal document and to put that document in the Kal's inventory.

Not every document can be printed, but the most important ones have this option enabled.

BUG FIXING

I found that, when there was a module playing in the background, when opening the game menu and closing it, the background music was not restored. Fixed.

I also fixed another bug related to the terminal command [BAR...]. Fixed.

MISC

• Since in room 18 Kal will found his first device, I added to the parser's code a section to handle this kind of items stored in the containers.
• I added new enemy's brain scripts
• I needed a random number generator in a terminal's script so I added the command: <varname>=random,<min>,<max> This command initialize <variable> with a random number between <min> ans <max>.

CONCLUSIONS

That all for this month!

Thank you all for your support and interest in this project!