Progress Update - August 20th, 2023
Hello everyone. After 23 days, I've climbed from the everlasting darkness that is page 4; to bring you another progress update. Not gonna lie it's been a bit since I last posted . I thought creating the HUD and the first enemy would only take a couple days, but I became occupied with other things.
Here's a list of roughly everything I did during these 23 days. Luckily I already have a list ready to copy and paste in.
- Implementation for the foundation for Enemy AI
- A proper implementation of the pause feature, capable of pausing timers as well.
- Reworked audio system for sound effects. Now a function can be called to play a specific sound effect on any inactive sound channel
- Cleaned up the GUI and written a Progress Bar class for future use
- Added "Armor Points to the Player which acts as damage reduction and sometimes as a second health bar.
- Written an entity event handler for deleting entities and other stuff in the future
- Rewritten the chunk system and how collisions are checked for better performance.
- Written an entire freaking particle system!
- With all that, I created a new enemy called the Spider.
- A bunch of bug fixes and tweaks.
As you can see, during the development of the Enemy AI. I kept feeling the need to do optimize and rewrite certain systems to improve them. I found that I need to write entirely new systems to make the new Enemy work! Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed doing all these things and I know that all the work I put in would really help me in the future and makes things faster. At the time of writing this, I remembered starting to work on the Enemy AI shortly after the beginning of this month.
There are a couple things I want to explain in more detail.
Heads-Up Display (HUD)While implementing this , it has gone through a couple iterations. I don't really know how to draw well, but I do have a bit of experience doing pixel art so I'm kind of glad of how it turned out. Of course, it's not the final result. There may still be more changes to come. Other than that, what the HUD will contain is self-explanatory and it already accomplishes it's purpose alright. The segmented bar design is inspired by the classic Castlevania games. You may notice a common theme of me taking a couple things from the Castlevania series.
Armor (AP)
Although the idea of adding Armor/Temporary Health has been in my head since before the development of this game even began. I was just shrugging it off as something I thought was " not needed" until very recently. I saw two ways I could go about implementing this mechanic. I could make it so Armor just reduces damage you take or just have Armor act essentially as a second Life bar. The first method was too boring ,and I thought the second method was too op for the game I'm trying to make. So I tried to combine the two methods... only to realize much later that I basically written a glorified version of the second method... oops. Well, I did have fun implementing Armor into the game and writing the damage calculations, so all's well that end well I guess.
Spider
After adding the Life bar to the game, I thought that the logically next step would be to add something to damage the player. Enemies are important as they will be one of the few obstacles to the player. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the thing the was working on for the past 18 days!
How the Spider behaves is very simple. It will chase the player once they enter their radius and perform a lunge once the spider is close enough to the player. That's it, this is what I've spent 18 days making... Granted, since this is the first enemy, I had to write the foundation that all future enemies will use, edit the subclass for handling damage to give handling for when a entity dies, had to account for multiple , and other stuff I don't feel like mentioning. On top of that, this is my first time writing something like this completely in code, so it was inevitable that I would make mistakes and had to retroactively fix them. It wasn't that bad to be honest. Now I'm confident that adding in the next enemy would be a lot faster.
Personal Thoughts
I'm starting to notice the unique relationship between the developer and the game, and how it contrasts with the player's relationship with the game. You may have noticed from the video and screenshot that only 4 of things mentioned in the list are visible. I don't have any more to add to this point, but it is interesting to think about.
Right now my game has a total of 1455 lines of code. This is probably the furthest I've made in the game. Sometimes, I think how far in the game I would've made it if I was using something like Unity. I heard about the stigma of not using a game engine to make games but I don't really understand it. People have been making games without an engine long before any general purpose game engines came into existence right? Besides, I like the charm and novelty of making a game this way. The idea of making something something practically nothing sounds pretty cool! Probably the reason I like the programming language I'm using as well. So you'll probably see me making more games without an engine in the future.
What's Next?
Right now I'm in the middle of doing cleanup and optimizations, trying to fix anything I may have missed . After that, I may try to see if I could have my game work in the browser as well as natively. Doing that makes the task of finding people to playtest the game a lot easier, as I'm pretty sure people are less likely to download a game made by complete nobody. If I can successfully make my game run in the browser, I upload it to a site like Newgrounds. I would want my game to be accessible on as many websites possible to gain the most traction. I'm planning to set up the Itch.io and Gamejolt page as well.
Then I will put some work in implementing interactable objects/pickups and keys.
With that, I'll see you guys in like, a month I hope.