Day 9

This is actually a post about today and a couple of hours yesterday. I came back to the game after my devlog update, and I fixed the terrain and tree generation.

Today I made some really solid progress, and it actually feels a bit like a game for the first time.

Progress

I added box colliders to all trees, and made them triggers. Hitting a tree reduces your health by 25 points (you begin with 100), and it slows you down by a fairly large amount, too.

Your health is now visible as a green bar at the bottom-right of the screen.

There’s a fairly basic calculation that results in your score being displayed just above your health bar.

If your health reaches 0 then you get a Game Over message with Play Again and Quit options that both work. If you fall off the side of the map (still very easy to do), you get the same popup.

If you hit a tree in the first few seconds of the game, you get a popup telling you how to control the player. Might be a bit pointless since you can’t really get past MeltyGuy (still haven’t named him) without pressing one of the direction buttons.

I added a title screen, and a bit of intro text. Neither one looks great, but they’re placeholders.

Problems

When you hit a tree it pops out of existence. I’d rather have some sort of animation. I’ve been considering a puff of snow and leaves and logs, but I’m not sure how easy that will be to implement.

There are fairly large patches in the game where the random number generator doesn’t want to put trees. I could add more trees, but then there might be areas that are too thickly populated. Perhaps adding some non-interactive scenery would help.

There’s nothing to do but avoid trees.

There’s no way to regain health, which might not be a bad thing.

There’s no end to the story yet.