Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, a look at the discovery of some lore in the lower tombs:
The week just past was a very productive one, I feel!
As a result, let me not attempt to list everything done, but instead just mention a few things that seem particularly salient to me:
First of all, I think that I have the lockpicking minigame nearly done: the pick is properly shaded (and fades out as it "exits the keyhole"), the backdrop has been tweaked slightly, and the pick even makes (stand-in) sounds as it scrapes and taps on the pieces of the lock. I haven't yet implemented sounds for success and failure, and the above-mentioned sound system may well want for some tweaking, however.
Here's a screenshot of the minigame as it currently appears:
I also returned to work on the level itself, and feel that I've made good progress.
As shown above, one of the two lore-threads to be found in the level has been implemented. There are a number of things to be seen in the lower tombs, amongst which are these: a love poem; a beheaded mummy; an empty sarcophagus; and a stack of notes regarding events in the tombs. Should the player examine all of these--which involves solving a puzzle in the case of the poem--they uncover a lore entry telling the story to which these objects hint.
On the subject of lore, and as somewhat shown above, I've made a decision: I now intend to not limit the lore-entries to the protagonist's point-of-view. This means that I can provide more depth in those entries, and that lore-entries provide information beyond what the player has already found in the process of uncovering them. I'm quite happy with the result, I feel!
However, I also feel that this leaves the general entries provided for each level no longer quite fitting--especially as they were written from the protagonist's perspective, and included mention of her objectives in the level, as I recall. I've thus removed those. (It's a little strange to no longer hear the lore-bells sounding when I start a level...)
I also implemented two more translation puzzles, in this case unlocking some journals that I intend to in turn unlock the other lore-entry to be found here.
These puzzles proved somewhat tricky to make: In the translation puzzle, the player "translates" words by matching known "word-roots" to them. Since I don't want to flood the player with such roots, there's a fairly limited set. As a result, it can be somewhat tricky, I find, to come up with an excerpt from the final text that reasonably fits the available roots! (Indeed, I added one more root to the set, meaning "person"--a root that seems likely to be useful to have!)
On the mechanical side, I've reworked how falling "damage" is calculated:
Previously, I examined the player-controller's acceleration to determine this, with higher accelerations above an initial threshold producing more "damage", and accelerations above a second threshold resulting in death. This is, I think, fairly accurate. However, it also proved a little changeable: variations in the time-interval between logic-updates could result in variation in the controller's velocity on hitting the ground, and thus variation in the acceleration applied in stopping the controller, too. This made the results of falling a little less reliable than I'd like, I feel.
What I have now is less accurate, but more reliable, I believe: I simply keep track of the maximum height that the player reaches while jumping or falling, and when the player hits the ground, I calculate how far they've fallen. If this value is greater than one threshold, "damage" is done (the amount depending on how much greater it is); if it's greater than another, higher threshold, the player dies.
Finally, on a minor note, I made a small adjustment to the main-menu backdrop: it was pointed out to me that the protagonist's arm was a bit short, so I lengthened it a little.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
