Week 3 Devlog:
We'll start with the video again, and as you can see a lot of progress has been made:
Obviously the main thing is that there are lot more final and near-final assets in the play scene--as always, thank EdwinDamen for the help. Since my last post I've actually made the battling part of this "Trash Battle," and I put out a prototype earlier this week with that working. However, since that prototype I've rearranged the neutral grid in the middle to be vertical rather than horizontal and reworked how it is refilled. There's also a short delay between when a matching piece is placed and when it disappears--I want to have a better animation at some point, but at least this explains things more. I have this build available for people to test if people are interested. However, I still have a ton to do over the next week:- There are a couple bugs I need to iron out you may have seen. The most worrisome one is that the computer player breaks a lot sooner than it should--in the previous prototype it generally keeps placing pieces until it runs out of space for the piece it picks (which is the loss condition), but here it stops playing (you can see when it has a piece in the preview pane when I don't) and doesn't lose until it runs out of space. The other one is that it keeps adding pieces to the neutral grid way late, which causes an excess of red pieces (instead of just stopping, it seems to keep going until it fills the grid). The former will require me to dig into my AI code, while the latter is probably just fixing my populate loop.
- Cutscenes are probably my next major project. I have an intro cutscene written, and copied over some of my cutscene code from last year, but have yet to reimplement it (especially since I want a bit more flair than last year).
- More flair is a lot of what I want--obviously Edwin will get more (and more polished) assets done over the next week and a half, but ideally I want things like short animations on attacks (which not only have to get designed, I have to learn how to implement). I also want to hopefully get some sound this year--that will probably take the form of free sound assets (unless I get really ambitious and/or get help), but that's still more than last year.
- Otherwise it's just fleshing things out: more pieces, more characters (including AI types and powerups) and more possible play scenes.