Devlog 3 - 11/05/24

Development of Scunthorpe Specials has continued this week, and has been the most productive week so far by far. I started off by making a pumpkin game object that would fly out of any random corner of the screen towards you every 15 seconds, dealing half your health in damage if you got hit. I sourced the sprite here:

https://www.remove.bg/upload. An audio clip plays when the pumpkin spawns to warn you that it is coming. I also created a death screen that displays if you are killed by the pumpkin. I made this by getting an image of a pumpkin and an image of a pub and overlaying the pumpkin. Pumpkin: 

https://www.hiclipart.com/free-transparent-background-png-clipart-isuzb. Pub: 

After this, I added an enemy sprite sheet, made through overlaying a picture of the purple drink from the game's backstory onto an 8 way movement sprite sheet I found. Drink: 

https://www.narconon.org/drug-abuse/purple-drank-effects.html. Sprite sheet: 

https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/8-directional-8-frame-movement-preview.103304/. I made so a collision with one of these enemies would take 10% of your health. Killing one of these enemies plays one of an array of sounds as well, much like picking up the 8 ball. I then added a screen for death upon one of these collisions similar to the pumpkin one but with a picture of a horse overlaid instead. Horse:  

After this I added a health bar to keep track of player health and a timer that counts down from 5 minutes. When the timer gets to 3 minutes another enemy spawner switches on and the timer turns yellow, then another at 1 minute along with the timer turning red. The three spawners spawn enemies every 10, 7 and 5 seconds respectively. I might change this though as the first 2 minutes of gameplay are too easy. The spawners can be seen as represented by red circles in the gameplay screenshots.

After this, I began working on the main menu, which consists of a video of my housemate Carter (the main character) eating some eggs on toast with some effects implemented. I found it very difficult to make the video work for a WebGL, as I didn't realise it wouldn't play like it did in the editor. I spent many hours watching tutorials and making builds in order to test the video until I finally worked it out. This was the most time consuming and confusing issue I encountered, but I think the sweat was worth it. I also found a free song online from here: 

https://cxm.co.uk/saving-the-great-british-pub-through-cx/. The Who is Carter scene has a picture of the real life Carter overlaid as well.

Lastly, I added a Scunthorpe Special that has a 3% chance to spawn every second behind the bar. Upon walking into this, another recorded vocal sample plays and 20% of your health is regained. I found the image for the Scunthorpe Special here: https://www.weekendnotes.com/british-chip-shop-curry-sauce-recipe/.

The feedback I received on the game at this point was that there is a glitch where the pumpkin can knock you through the wall. The suggested fix for this was to change the pumpkin to a trigger rather than a collider. There was also feedback about fixing the enemy spawners so that they can't spawn on the exact location you are, or at least cannot hurt you upon doing so. The final piece of constructive feedback was that the first 2 minutes of gameplay seemed slow, which I would agree with. These issues will be the first tackled when I continue development. The remaining feedback was positive, mainly commenting on the how the 8 ball shooting and picking up mechanics seemed to work well.