Moving from wordpress to itch.io and other general improvements

Moving to itch.io

I've been looking into options for publishing lately and I've heard a lot of positive things about itch.io. I read a bit more about the platform and I think it's the perfect fit for a small game as the one I'm working on right now. It's easy and cheap (free even) to publish frequent updates.

I'm also moving the devlog from wordpress to itch.io as well. I think it makes more sense to have as many resources related to the game on the same platform.

Adding the Archer

Before I started drawing the sprites I took to youtube to get some reference footage for drawing and shooting a bow.

At first I wanted to have archers draw their sword when the player gets too close, but I decided against it as it would overlap with the role of the Militia.

Projectile Weapons

With the addition of projectile weapons like the bow, it was time to refactor some weapon related stuff that has been a long time coming. I'm using ScriptableObjects as modular 'effects' that can be attached to weapons. I now have four different types of attacks:
* Single Target
* AOE Discrete
* AOE Continuous
* Projectile Attack

And each one takes either a Damage Effect or a Spawn Projectile Effect (you can guess which ones take which). This simplified a lot of the logic with regards to how I apply weapon effects and made the code easier to understand.

Gibs

For fun, I experimented with adding gibs to enemies when they die. I really like the gruesome over the top effect it adds to the game and it's very much within the style that I want to pursue.

Minimap

In order to improve performance, I've decided to pause rooms that the player has visited but is no longer in. This meant that the player can no longer keep track of where they've been without actually visiting the room. I've added a minimap to make keeping track of this information easier. I'm not set on the style of the current map, but it's simple enough and there's no need to make it any more complicated than it is. Maybe something for future me.

UI Improvements

I did a lot of work in streamlining the UI and making it consistent across the board. The colours of each attribute is now consistent with the attributes related to it, even on the upgrade screen. The upgrade screen itself might get a rework eventually but I'm content with its current state.

Level Design

My current level design philosophy is to keep the rooms small and have one idea each. The current rooms actually implemented in the game weren't designed with this philosophy in mind, as they're more for testing, but I look forward to actually adding some of the rooms I've got in the backlog.

I hope to publish more frequent dev logs in the future, perhaps diving into more technical stuff. I'll be migrating the logs I already have on wordpress to itch.io to have all the logs in one place.

If you want to keep up with updates I maintain a progress log on youtube with short videos focusing on the changes: Progress Log Link