The past week or so has been… tough due to some personal news that I don’t want to get into here. Nevertheless, taking some time to focus and do some gamedev work was good for me. I didn’t accomplish a whole lot, but I was able to get a few more things done. In no particular order:
Fixed an issue with cross fading between maps. For some reason the volume was not getting capped, so the volume of a song would just keep rising well past the allowed volume. The song wouldn’t get any louder, but it did cause issues when fading out from an extra high volume and end up with two songs playing until the first one finally reached an allowed volume range. I believe this also fixed some random, untraceable crashes as it has not crashed on me once since doing this.
I ported over the multiple input code from Winter, allowing use of both keyboard and gamepad at the same time. It’s definitely still not the most efficient way of doing it, as it assigns a separate control object for both gamepad and keyboard, but it’s done, it works, and I don’t really care. 🤓
I added little captions for when you enter certain areas, such as Anastasia’s House, or the town (which I have named “Haven” for now, but not sure if I will stick with it yet). I am dabbling with the idea of an additional town on another island to justify having an inn on each, and where they would have trade relations. We will see if I go ahead with this idea or not.
There was already an existing effect for scrolling an image across the screen used for clouds in the background and cloud shadows over top of the map. However this effect would draw shadows in the sky which bugged me. Fortunately I already had a script which could render the map to a canvas and save it to an image. I was able to modify that script to create a stencil canvas of anywhere that did not have any pixels colored on the map, and use it with a subtract blend to cut out cloud shadows where they should not be drawn. I think the final effect ended up pretty nice:
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Next on my todo list are more scenario updates - changing the way the first cave works, in particular, as it’s quite annoying to pass through, and the conversation with Freidrich at the end is extremely lengthy and should be broken up. As well, I want to complete the previously incomplete and thus disabled Inventory screen. It “works” currently, but acts only as a list of items that you have collected (which is not much yet). I want to divide this up into various categories of items and make finding/purchasing equipment a bit more of a part of the game. There are some unused assets, as well as some I may borrow from Hyptosis and Corey. It should be interesting developing this part some more.
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Of course, the game right now is hardly long enough to justify such changes, so as hinted above already I think I am going to lean into expanding the game to actually make it worth playing, and doing all these updates. It seems to be getting a lot of positive reception wherever I’ve shown it, so I think it could do “well” as a followup to Winter. Of course this would mean delaying working on Mannux a bit more, but given there are Godot 4 features I want to take advantage of before really starting to work on it in earnest, I think it will be worth the wait.
In terms of a bit more details, I definitely want to expand the first “green” island, as there is already a section you can only get to with the grapple item you find in the first dungeon. There is also a completely unused desert tileset that I want to take advantage of for a second island. And of course it wouldn’t be difficult to add in another color swapped dungeon or two, though designing them will be interesting. Fortunately the tileset used in Fukyuuten is a good deal easier to use than Winter’s, so I believe expanding the content won’t take too long, relatively speaking.
For a desert dungeon, a potential boss enemy is already being designed by my friend Adam (insomniacsoleil on Discord).
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He would have several different attacks, but I’ll leave those as a surprise. ;)