Day 7 -- Polish!
That's a wrap! My first #7drl is done. Final game is available here.
My morning was tutorialization. Having played some entries from previous years, I felt like this was commonly a major gap. You'd get dropped into these worlds with a lot of mechanics and it can be hard to figure out what's going on except through repetition. I had an idea about a simple tutorial level that would introduce the key movement and enemy behavior concepts. The hardest part was dealing with spaghetti code issues that made it difficult to have what amounted to a separate instance of the game. Once that was cleaned up, crafting a tutorial was really satisfying. My one regret is that my system of "triggers" that post instruction messages had zero awareness of player actions. They were purely positional. So it's quite possible to complete the tutorial not having done much of what the tutorial suggests you do. Maybe a future engine design will have a better tutorial trigger system built in.
The other key updates for the day:
- Laser color gets darker the farther it is from the source. Gives the player some sense of how far off an enemy is, even if they can't see them. Plus it adds some more visual depth.
- Speaking of depth, added some slight variation to floor and wall colors.
- Added little animations when the player uses special moves. One play-tester reported it felt a little flat when you used the abilities.
- Added a new enemy type, sentries.
- Added some difficulty scaling between levels. The farther you get, the more enemies and enemy types spawn. Plus [REDACTED].
- Added some thematic animations to the title screen so it didn't look quite so sad.
- Implemented a truly janky "reset" mechanism if you want to dive back into another run.
- Added notices when the hunter enters the level.
[REDACTED]
Late in the day, I was doing some play tests with folks, focused especially on the tutorial. One player from the discord played more of the main game, and had this to say.
From this misunderstanding spawned a key new idea. I won't describe it here, but you'll find it on L-1. I probably shouldn't have implemented an idea as disruptive as this on the final afternoon, but it's really cool and adds some extra flavor to the last stage. Overcoming it feels even better than before.
Not much more to say than that! I'll leave some more screenshots here just to memorialize its final game-jam state.
