A Cutscene Scored

First of all, on music: I returned to various royalty-free sites and searched again their collections in the week just past. And between what I had previously found and what I turned up in these new searches, I think that I have at the least stand-in music for all gameplay elements, as well as for the intro- and first-level- cutscenes. (The prologue cutscene I've decided to leave music-less for the moment--it's short enough and has enough ambient sound that I think that it can stand without music.)

None of the music is quite right, I fear. And further, the scoring of the cutscenes is somewhat clumsy, as it involves my cobbling together various pieces of music to convey the various feelings that I'm looking for, to the timings of the scenes. But for the moment, and for demo purposes, I think that what I have works well enough.

The game's sound effects also saw some work in the week just past. There are two changes that might be worth mentioning here:

First and simplest, I've added a gong-like sound that is played when the player selects a collectible or lore-entry in their collection. I'm hoping that this adds a little bit of additional sense of saliency and mystery to these items, I suppose.

Second, I've implemented support for voicing of conversations. Now, I don't know that I will ever manage to get them voiced, but it's something that I want implemented ahead of time, in case I do. Further, I don't want them to be entirely silent either way, so I've added a "default sound" that's played when no voice-line exists for a given piece of text. Right now, that default is a simple drum-like beat, which I'm hoping is sufficiently dramatic. (And might add to the startlement of a few of the more-unexpected conversations. )

I don't know whether either of the above-mentioned sounds are final; we'll see as we go forward!

Remaining with aesthetics, I believe that I mentioned previously that I was unhappy with my "general-purpose" font. In the week just past I once again undertook some font-searching, attempting to remedy this. I did settle on one--Bitstream Vera Sans, I believe--but it was very plain, and I was unhappy with it. In the end, what I've done is simply to increase in various places the size of the font that I was using. It's perhaps less elegant than it was, but I do think that the change improves the text's legibility, which seems more important to me.

There are some situations in which I haven't changed the font-size, however; whether that will prove a problem remains to be seen.

On the mechanical side, I spent some time polishing the "climbing" mechanic:

First of all, I've fixed a minor but unpleasant "skip" in the view that happened when starting a climb from above.

Aside from that, I worked on making the process feel a little smoother, taking into account the player-character's speed at the start of the climb. I was perhaps a little anxious about doing so: I feared making so central a mechanic feel worse. Still, I think that it was worth making the attempt.

And I think that I have improved it a little. In the end, while I did succeed in making it much smoother than it was, I pulled back from doing so to a great degree: In the case of catching a surface as the player dropped down, the smooth transition from falling to climbing slowed the action down a bit much. And in the case of catching a surface while jumping up, the increased vertical speed made the process feel perhaps too smooth and effortless. I hope that what I have now retains the feeling of the climb calling for some effort, without bogging it down too much.

Moving over to the game's levels, I've added support for automatic removal of specified inventory items on exiting a level. This provides a convenient means of having certain items that are no longer relevant be "dropped" between levels.

This feature is currently implemented in the "exit" game-object, which does mean that it's theoretically possible for a level to be exited without this code being run. Furthermore, if an exit were to be used to "exit" to a cutscene with the intention of returning to the same level, the code might be run when it likely shouldn't be. However, I think that both of these are fairly unlikely scenarios, for this game, at least.

Turning to the first level, specifically, I decided to move one of the items therein: One of the upper tombs contains an important scrap of paper. I had hidden this in a corner of the tomb, perhaps wanting it to not be obvious. But I had also long been a little uncomfortable with this placement, fearing that it was too unobvious: it's a small scrap, of a colour similar to the floor, in a corner. In the week just past I decided at last to move it, placing it on the tomb-slab, near the corpse that rests thereon.

And once again, a number of things were done that don't seem worth reporting here! Bugs were fixed, polish worked on, details of implementation changed, and so on.

One thing that I've noticed over the past few weeks is that while there have been plenty of bugs, it's seemed that most have been fairly quickly fixed. Seldom have I encountered something that called for major changes. I find this quite encouraging. ^_^

That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^