Day 9
I think today may have been the most frustrating day I've had developing Mari Quest. This morning, I implemented the Magic Cloak power-up (currently it just gives you the hi-jump ability, as there isn't really anything in the prototype right now that would necessitate a boost in defense). It works great! Mari can now jump up to platforms that were, until she acquired the cloak, out of reach. I still haven't made a sprite for the Magic Cloak, so I've just been using a placeholder in the meantime. I have a palette picked out for Mari's costume change, but I haven't implemented it yet because it seems a bit superfluous at this point in development.
It was in testing Mari's Magic Cloak and Red Magic at the same time that I ran into trouble. That statement is a bit misleading, actually. What happened was, I realized that the system I'm using to determine the player's magic selection stopped working when Mari changed rooms. Now, I've had bugs, some of them have been big enough to force a reset when encountered, but this is the first bug I've run into that has really demanded immediate attention, since it was tied to so many essential systems. So I stopped where I was for the day re: magic and decided I would fix that bug then and there. Fast forward a few hours and I still hadn't figured it out. I was starting to get flustered. So I walked away from the game and worked on classwork until I had enough energy to figure it out. I was feeling pretty demoralized.
Luckily, I managed to narrow down the issue the next time I opened Mari Quest's project file. I noticed that the bug affected more than the selection system; it also affected Mari's energy in a pretty strange way. She seemed to use a greater and greater amount of energy every time a scene change occurred. So, I did some debugging and concluded that something had to be wrong with how Mari was spawned in each scene. There was no way one instance of Mari could use that much energy... so maybe there was more than one instance of the player character? I created an attribute to track the number of player characters on and off screen and confirmed my suspicion.
You can see here how the number of actors increases everytime Mari enters the room on the right. (Please excuse the busy HUD. I've been using it for a lot of debugging today.) I knew what was causing the problem now! Except... I didn't know how to solve it. This was never an apparent issue before, so it couldn't be something with how I was handling scene transitions, right? I really wasn't sure. So I went to Discord for help. Big shoutouts to Mitsu from MFGJ's server and BMJ and CrimzicZ who helped me narrow down the issue and resolve it. In the end, I ended up making some adjustments to the scene transitioning's behavior, and the problem was solved. Huzzah!
At this point most of the day had already passed, so I quickly added in a few things and set up my work for tomorrow. There's still no difference in energy expenditure between Blue and Red Magic (this should be as simple as changing a value or two when I get to it), but Red Magic can now dispel red barriers.
This is a buffet as far as GIFs go. First, you can see Mari's improved jumping ability, then you see her use Red Magic to get through to the next room, and then you get a peek at the next room where I have started to work on figuring out some lighting effects.
Tomorrow, I'd like to continue implementing the Magic Lantern, try and implement a new system for screen transitions (that trigger a scene change regardless of whether Mari is standing or crawling), and maybe start watching some tutorials on how to use Stency's dialog extension if I have time.
Game dev, I'm learning, can be really frustrating sometimes, but getting past those walls and figuring out solutions to bugs and other issues is a great feeling. ヽ(' ∇' )ノ
As always, thank you for reading!