Total lines of code: 2648
Working through November has certainly been challenging. A lot of fine-tuning, fixing bugs, revisiting half-finished ideas and getting the demo to a playable state. If you've ever developed a game, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of fixing something only to find two more things that require your attention, and that's certainly how this has felt (reminds me of that episode of Malcolm where Hal goes to fix the kitchen lightbulb only to find the light switch is malfunctioning, then going to fix that and seeing that a cupboard door is squeaky, then going to fix that and... you get it).
The "end of October" release date for the tech demo has now been moved to "end of November". Feature creep is unavoidable but putting a milestone at this stage of development feels like a necessity to begin working on other aspects of play. Once the demo is out and people (hopefully) play it and produce feedback, I look forward to many more rounds of feature creep / reworks to come.
NEW STUFF:
- Game now recognizes the player dying and there's a game over screen with a restart button available.
- A gallery has been added that stores pictures which didn't make it into the actual game but that have potential to be useful for something. At this time, this accounts for ~60 something images. The gallery is dynamically generated, so future images can just be dumped into the gallery folder without me having to do any more work to display them. This is light-years away from my previous gallery attempt in BB-Breakout, where every single button for every single image and every single script was hand-made which was extremely time-consuming. The gallery is also pre-loaded with the game, as the first iteration had a minor-but-avoidable ~2 second load while all the images were loaded for the first time (based on one of my first tutorials which showed how to preload particle effects to avoid hiccups in game, like in BB-Breakout's ball particles).
- Added and reworked combat feedback to be able to show color and sound. So, suffering damage is now associated with a certain animation (eg, the player portrait flashes red) and the code calls an appropriate sound to match the attack. Every entity (player/enemy) now has an enum_type which designates it as a Player, Monster, etc, and I have added sounds to be picked from randomly when they're hit. The sounds were sourced from Freesound and, like everything else, are a WIP.
- Options popup, currently includes a volume slider that manages the volume for the Master bus (my first working version of one!).
MAJOR BUG FIXES:
- The infinite buff bug is now actually fixed with a solution which, in my head, was going to take 5 mins and ended up taking up a whole morning.
- Previously, exporting the game caused it to lose track of pathing for custom resources and images. The code has been fixed so that pathing doesn't break on exporting any more. As a sidenote, I run into this problem every time that I want to export a new project and, while I understand that appending .import and .remap to stuff is important in some weird way, this seems to be one of the most ubiquitous and nonsensical problems for Godot to have. Anyway.
- Player can no longer interact with environment items during battle (don't access the endgame stuff before killing the boss, cheaters) ((jk, I haven't added the endgame screen yet)).
PLANNED ADDITIONS:
- Save/load data needs to access user:// instead of res://.
- Planned actions should warn player that they do not have enough mana to perform this action, but still allow players to queue it in case they have also queued a downstate or are about to receive an attack which will force them to downstate. Idea: downstates from enemy attacks only recover 50-75% of mana.
- Saving my future ideas in a centralized location instead of scattering little post-its everywhere between .txts, my notebooks and these blogs.
- Some kind of tutorial in the form of in-game images or screenshots showing how to play / what the buttons do.
- Some kind of endgame scene to let you know that the demo is, in fact, over and that killing the Succubus means you saved the world.