Lost Caves Devlog #8 - Boss Phases and Pixel Crispness

So, I'm gonna be honest, last week was a bit slow. That said, progress was made, but given that it's mostly regarding the boss, which I'm still neglecting to show a lot of, the amount of stuff I can talk about is a bit low.

Earlier last week though (and this is relevant, I promise) I rewatched my favorite Disney movie, Atlantis: The Lost Empire. If you're unfamiliar with it, to briefly sum it up, a bunch of people go deep underground to find the lost remnants of Atlantis, which sank into the sea 10,000 years ago. My favorite part of the movie is the entire underground journey, and seeing all the ancient ruins they come across. After I finished it, I started thinking, "Why haven't I used this as inspiration for Lost Caves?" Lost Caves takes place entirely underground, and given how a lot of Atlantis takes place underground as well, a lot of the aesthetics in it I could probably incorporate into Lost Caves' aesthetics. The game I think really lacks in the set-dressing department, and it's something I plan to work on a lot once the game is feature complete and hits beta. Once I reach that point, I'll likely be looking to things like Atlantis for inspiration.

Anyways, this week was still primarily focused on developing the boss. As of now, the boss's first phase is pretty much done, and can be fought through. I always planned to have a second phase, though. It would be difficult to implement, though, and that's partially my fault, since the code for the boss didn't account for a second phase. Even if it did, though, given that the second phase looks very different, it would have to be a separate game object altogether, since it has a different sprite that needs to be rigged differently. I suppose if I planned things better, though, I could avoid some of the issues this is causing. Originally I was gonna make a different script altogether for the second phase's game object, but given that they still behave relatively similar, I managed to make them share the same script, but with different methods handled depending on what phase it's in. I'm sorry I have to be this vague, by the way. I'd love to show more about what the boss is and how it's fought, but I feel like if I show too much, it kinda spoils the surprise factor of what it is, so I'm gonna remain hush-hush on it for now.

Also, unrelated to the boss fight, but I was trying to find a workaround to a graphical issue I'm having with Lost Caves. It's super minor, but I'd like to fix it if possible. The issue involves the game's camera. Right now, I use the PixelPerfect2D package for Unity, which allows everything to snap to the nearest pixel. That way you don't have graphical artifacts when things move "half" a pixel. I like it, but the issue is that things can only be scaled up by an integer value. So it can only be 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. larger. This is of course to preserve the pixel-perfect look, but my game, when full-screened, doesn't take up the entire screen as a result. That's mostly because the game is a 5x3 aspect ratio as opposed to 16x9, but it's too late to change that, now. Anyways, you can have the game stretch to fill the entire screen, but it applies a bilinear filter to everything, so the pixels aren't crisp. The reason for that is so there isn't a visible distortion of pixels, since they aren't increased by an integer value (I hope that makes sense).

 However, given how large the pixels would be if you full screened it to 1080p (or even 720p), the distortion would be barely noticeable, and objects would still abide by a pixel grid, which is what I mostly care about. There was a forum post I read about people who didn't like the bilinear filtering, and one of the devs for PixelPerfect2D package agreed to add functionality to remove bilinear filtering. I was able to change it via code, but it reverts back to bilinear whenever you open Unity. I don't know for sure if that functionality is there, yet, but hopefully it will be soon.

Anyways, sorry there's nothing super interesting to report. I may start working on the gauntlet level soon, though. So stay tuned for that, because I'm sure there will be a lot of juicy for me to talk about when I design that level!