There are many things implemented since last develog as I haven’t been able to find a moment to update the devlog. I’ve been very busy preparing the first playtest version.
This version features just 4 rooms of the whole castle, but with final polish and aesthetics. The purpose of this first playtest is just guess if I’m following the right direction and if there are things that, before starting seriously, need to be polished first.
But before showing anything, let’s summarize what has been introduced since last time.
+ Added the first enemy into the castle, the slug: it’s behaviour is really simple, moves slowly until it finds an obstacle or a void. If an obstacle, returns in the opposite direction, if it finds a void, it jumps to the ceil if possible or changes direction if not.
* BUG: When climbing up or down the ladders I disabled the collisions with the collider the player was touching. This affected other entities that make use of sensors to know if they are touching the ground, like the new slug enemy. Fixed.
* BUG: When going up or down the ladders, the character appeared sometimes on other places with ladders. There was a problem with the slugs touching the ladder areas and sending messages that were received incorrectly by the player. Fixed.
+Addeed player energy management. If the player has energy, she can lose it, so we need to introduce a whole new state: Pain.
+ This state required new animations to be added.
+ This state required new visual and audio feedbacks.
+ I worked on torchs and lights. Each torch can have up to 4 particle systems, but most pf them have just 2.
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+ I worked on many props for the game, some of them not still used: light bulbs, iridiscent plants, the big eye (you’ll see later), new ladder…
+ Added the entrance to the castle:
You will return to the castle through this pipe door.
+ Added general lighting to the rooms. Changed several times the illuminating spot, and finally used a exponential flare.
These torchs use 4 particle systems: fire, sparks, smoke, and lighting flares which produce that fluctuating effect on the background walls.
From this point on, I started working on the first playtest version of the game:
* Worked on several versions of the ladders, new iridiscent flowers versions, wall basboards.
+ Added skidding particles when character receives pain.
+ Added red illuminating flares to the slugs and a white one to the main character. This eases the visualization of the player on really dark areas (I borrowed that from “The dungeoning” : )
* BUG: Fixed (temporary) a random crash happening on the initialization. One thread was loading data while other was using it. A better fix is needed here.
*BUG: Fixed a bug that let the player kill a creature while in ladder. Currently when the player is climbing ladders she should not be able to attack.
+ Added spawn points into the rooms. Before that, the player was spawning at (0,0) falling down.
* Fixed sound levels. Some sounds where really low compared to other and produced a strange feedback on the player.
+ Added high attack and lower attack, for creatures crawling on the ground.
* BUG: Fixed a crash due to a bad type casting from CBVComponent to CBoundingVolume class ! o_O
* BUG: Appeared a strange bug when going 1920×1080 fullscreen in the PlayTest release version. The game was in a strange slow motion! Not low frame rate, just a slow motion. I finally discovered the problem. I thought doing a full fixed time step for the entire application loop was a really good idea. It seems it wasn’t that good. When the game decreased the frame rate it entered the spiral loop of death and needed more loops to perform the collision detection, what decreased even more the frame rate, what caused the collision system to perform even more steps…
And these are the results!
You can see here the same 4 rooms I presented on previous devlogs, this time with a near finished and polished appearance:
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Click on the images if you wanna see the high resolution version of the image.
And that’s it! Want to see a bit of the play test version in action?
If after all these walls of text, you arrived here, then you deserve a gift: a picture of a “Dev At Work” !
Thanks for reading!
