Posted May 12, 2024 by marcomeijer
Hello everyone! This week I have been mostly working on implementing the frog and butterflies into the game.
Butterflies
These are the first flying entities in crystal realms. The way they work is that they have a direction in which they are flying to, and a rotation speed that changes their direction. They also have an acceleration speed for their rotation, and this value randomly changes over time. Which makes these butterflies randomly fly around, while still looking smoothly and realistic. In the future I also want to implement that they prefer to stay near flowers.
I also added that these butterflies can be picked up with an empty jar. Then you can release them again later (if the entity limit of the world has not been reached yet). The same is true for slimes.
Frogs
Frogs are by far the most complex entities in the game so far. They have 2 idle animations, croaking and blinking. They randomly jump, and their jump animation has multiple frames depending on the frogs vertical velocity.
Frogs are the first entity that you can feed. Once you feed them a butterfly they drop a random frog related item as a thank you gift. And they will also follow you around for a few minutes. I am still not done with them yet though, I want to give them sound effects. I have been thinking of creating a particle effect for them too. There is still no way to get them in the game though, I will add that in one of the next devlogs.
Potion effects
I have implemented the effects of the jump boost potion, mining speed potion and crystal shards boost potion. I will probably re-balance the crystals you get from mining blocks because of this though. Otherwise they would be too overpowered. The only potion I haven't implemented yet is the regeneration potion, because I am planning to redesign the health system.
New health system
A design problem that I have is that I both want combat in my game (with other players and monsters), and let the players be kill-able by parkour elements (for example lava blocks). But these two things benefit from entirely different health systems. In combat it would be better if your health regenerated back very slowly or not at all. But in parkour it would be better if you regenerate all your health back only after a few seconds of not being hit by lava. Currently your health regenerates back too fast for combat, and too slow for parkour.
So what I am planning to do is to have two different health bars (And more in the future). One for combat, that will be shown on top of your hotbar constantly, and is basically your main health bar. And another one for being hit by lava. Think of this second one as a health bar before you get burned down. This fire health bar only gets shown whenever you get hit by lava, and it will disappear a few seconds after not being on fire. I am planning to make the cacti use your regular health bar though, since I think this can also be interesting if you want to make a parkour where you don't want the players to regenerate quickly.
In the future I could for example add another health bar whenever I add water. This health bar would show you your oxygen level before you drown.
Thanks for reading this devlog, and I hope you are excited for the next update!