Devlog: Day 6

Another product day on the project. I spent more time still cleaning up internal systems a bit as well as some improvements to UI/UX, mob movement, and object housekeeping.

Overview of work for the day

Planned tasks

• Draw order (skipped) - I didn't get a chance to touch this issue yet, will move it to another day. The plan is to split the enemies into 2 tables and drove the relevant tables at the right time.
• Difficulty curve (mostly done) - this may take more refinement as I play test more once the game is closer to complete, but I've put in a recursive function to curve the difficulty as the game progresses
• Spawn graphics (done) - I added a particle effect to emphasis the mobs warping into the level (will improve this later likely)
• Juice up enemy animation (iterated) - I added a mild sine wave offset for the mob movement; and each type uses this differntly; the ice mobs float up-and-down, while the fire mobs inch along moving side-to-side

Unplanned tasks

• UI/UX
• New sprites for the health and mana bars
• pixel fill for screen transitions to fade out the play field a bit
• cleaned up the level transition screen
• added a delay to the 'proceed' to next level function so that players don't accidentally advance
• Created a palette shifter for level drawing so that I can reuse tile sets without having to draw everything in each color
• Refinement of code for drawing transition screen to make it a bit more elegant and reusable

Screenshots

• Add missing sound effects for all features currently in the game
• refactor internal systems a bit to get key functions in the right part of the code
• work on the mana regen/economy system
• idle and attack animations for the player
• Draw order system for mobs from the top and the player missile traveling north and south

Now off to bed as the sun is rising...