As the title may suggest, a major task during the week just past was the search for both music and a font.
The font was intended to be a replacement for my current "general text" font--the one used for the majority of the text in the game. While I like the one that I'm using at the moment, I do fear that it's not a legible as I'd like at the size that I'm using.
So I went searching on a handful of free-font sites for a replacement--but alas, I didn't find anything that fitted my desires. While I did find a few that I liked, issues with their licences prompted me to leave them. (In particular, it seems that a large number of fonts use the "SIL" licence, and while this licence
may be safe for me to use, I'm not confident of that.)
As to music, I had a little more success there, I think. I fear that music is a bit of a weak point for me, and that I didn't always know at first what might work. As a result, I ended up trawling through various collections of royalty-free music more than once. But in time I think that I learned better what types of music seemed to work, and thus what I was looking for.
And between the collections that I already knew and
freesound.org (to which I was directed by someone on Twitter, I believe), I may have found pieces to cover all gameplay sections, and
possibly the alternate-ending cutscene and the end-of-demo "cutscene", too. I might like a little more variety, perhaps, or other changes, but at the least I may have stand-in music!
(I haven't yet downloaded and tried out the ambient sounds that I currently intend to back level-exploration, so we have yet to learn whether that works!)
I also ended up making some changes to the music-related logic of the game:
In cutscenes, music-tracks can now have an offset applied to their starting-times, which can in turn be specified in the editor. This allows me a little more control over the "scoring" of my cutscenes, I feel.
Elsewhere, I separated out the music-related logic of the "World" class (which is the base-class for levels and the "combat-world"), creating a new "MusicListPlayer" base-class. This allowed me to have the minigames derive from this base-class, too, thus taking advantage of its logic. I further added a volume-scalar to the base-class, allowing me to have different sections of the game play their music at different volumes relative to each other--levels are quieter than minigames, for example.
Stepping away from music, I've added two new visual effects to the combat mechanic, as shown above. Now, when the player receives an attack that "stuns" them, white "spikes" drive in from the sides, and the camera performs a quick, pulsing zoom -in and -out. Both may see changes going forward, but I think that they add somewhat to the impact of such attacks.
(As noted above, the "pulse-zoom" can be disabled in the options menu, I believe, for those who may dislike or be adversely affected by it.)
Various sound effects saw some work, too. To start with, I added a few new sounds: a handful to be played when the player is "stunned" in combat, and one for attempting to open a chest that's tied shut. I also reworked the various player-character "pain" sounds--the previous set were... not good, I fear. The new ones seem better, at least--although whether they're good (and actually sound like they come from someone female ^^; ) I don't know!
On the graphical side, I may have slightly improved the highlights produced by the player-light--but I want to try another change, and so I'm not yet ready to show the results.
And finally, I worked on a number of bug-fixes, changes, and minor additions that don't seem worth mentioning here.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
