Progress
Back at it again today and things are going swimmingly in terms of progress. While I'm still a bit staggered by UI CSS at the moment, I did still find a simple method of displaying a bit of text on the screen about the mission. We have "Mission Failed" when the player explodes, "Mission Success" when the player blows up the core and leaves, and "Self Destruct Activated" to tell the player to leave once they exit the core. So while the game doesn't quit and close out on you, it will at least tell you that you won which is a huge success.
Today I also implemented two simple gameplay elements; a door and a crusher. The door is simple; if you destroy the nearby core "keys", the door changes states and opens. The Crusher meanwhile starts at one position, moves to another, and does so every X seconds. When it comes to creating a cycle or tempo to the game, I can make sure it syncs up in multiples of seconds with everything else. I decided to simply make the entire thing active and damaging, and pretty severely at 5 damage right now compared to the players 10 hit points. Calling it some sort of force-barrier thingy that damages seemed sci-fi enough and simpler than trying to go for specific-sided hurt boxes during motion or some such to actually crush the player. Two of these together would still get the same job done.
Enemies now will cease fire when the player is not in range! This might prevent a few friendly fire incidents where a more distant turret is firing at the player through a nearer turret; this can also be prevented with game design by putting blocking terrain, but I felt it important to not have a future large group of entities all making more calls when they won't be doing anything useful. In light of that, I also decided to turn every enemy onto a global firing time. Instead of personally tracking the last time they fired, every enemy will fire at a designated cycle if it can. If these are made into multiples of each other then we can get some staggered firing going on with different groups of turrets, and create that cyclical feel we're looking for to meet the theme.
I think the most interesting thing today though was a stab at some music. I found a sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/ ) that seemed like it had a variety of options, a simple interface, and import/export functions. I've played music before, I have a very very basic idea of musical theory, and I've heard people talk about composing before; so short to say I knew nothing. I looked for a synth instrument, set up a minor scale, and had the top and bottom of the scale play an appropriate chord and that fit about half of what I needed. It's not the worlds greatest art but it was pretty servicable. I added a competing descending scale in opposition to the ascending minor scale I had, put it into big long whole notes and set it to a harpsichord and it gave the whole thing a little extra oomph. It felt a plenty spacey and a bit clockwork; ultimately a very simple 4 measures but it felt very slow. I would compare and contrast the sort of slow methodical energy I had found against this track for an old favourite game of mine
There's a lot going on there that's a bit above my composition level here, but I think half of what gives that track its energy is that it has a beat and mine really doesn't. It's not complicated either; two short beats and a longer one. There's more complicated stuff happening there too if you listen in but i think that's enough to yoink and try to add in some energy, and wouldn't you know it, it merged together kinda nicely. If you want to listen to the current theme, you can use this link: https://onlinesequencer.net/3527930Checklist
There's a lot more I can do for the game now, but I think we've hit the lowest bar now for this being a completed game. It has the bare necessities to actually be fun on its own. That said we have plenty more work we can do, and levels we can design too which aught to be extra fun. To round things out, this is the list of things I'm thinking of next.
- UI Element for players health
- A Main Menu for the game
- A player controlled stop/slow power
- Crusher collision noises
- Player hurtSound
- Crusher appearance
-- Everything could use a replacement for their filler look
- Make it more obvious that the core does something with the laser dish and that's why it's big and important. Means a dish redesign.
- Make the door key objects look different than the core. They probably should end up color coded with doors as well ala Doom keys and dors.
- Give the player an "engine" sound when manuevering, and maybe an engine flame effect too.
- Background needs objects that the player can use to orient themselves and not get lost in deep space. Deep space likely needs a technical boundary as well.