Kind of Antsy

I’m a day late! To all my loyal reader, I apologize. I was in Boston yesterday celebrating a friend’s birthday. I also attended the MIT flea market and coincidentally ran into a member of Freezepop, a band I love, so that was pretty damn cool. In regards to accomplishments this week, I wrote up a decently long to-do list that will help me stay on track with polishing the stuff I already have in place. I was watching a YouTube video today on game dev mistakes, and they were talking about how they added stuff without polishing it, and how the game looked like garbage when they first showed it off. As such, I figure I should dedicate some time to polish.

The first thing I did was to get death and hit animations created. Previously, when the player was hit, nothing happened to indicate they were hit except the light level going down. Similarly, when the player died, the game just kind of ended. The hit animation has been implemented, but the death animation got me thinking about how I want to handle player death. This lead me down another path, starting with adding in differentiators in the code for when the player dies by just running out of light, or if it was a hit from an enemy that took the last of their light away. Based on how the player died, different things will occur:

1. If the player is just running out of light, once they hit a certain threshold (perhaps a 10 second countdown), the screen will start shaking and the camera zooming in on the player character. This will indicate to the player that they’re about to die without needing to explicitly put in a timer. I recognize that screen shake isn’t for everyone, so I’m trying to make it relatively subtle, and I’ll have to include an option to disable it entirely for folks that really hate it. Once the countdown is over, the circle of light will contract fully to 0, and the screen will be black.
2. If the player is hit and the last of their light is taken away, the death animation will play while the camera zooms in on the player and the circle will contract to 0.
3. In the event that the player is running out of light, then they are hit, the step 1 will occur, then step 2 will override.

I also added in a few ‘cheats’ for the purposes of debugging. One adds invincibility (which also may be useful for invincibility frames after taking a hit or during a dodge). The second just turns on the environmental lighting so I can see what’s going on outside of the circle of light.

I wonder if I should start actually tracking the hours I spend on this. Maybe it’ll encourage me to dedicate more time and focus harder. Also, I’m trying to get some ADHD medication adjustments so I can actually focus… so that’ll be cool.

The last thing I really did this week was go through some previous software purchases and downloaded some music making and editing tools. I’ve always wanted to make my own music and this might be a good opportunity to try that out!