Summary:
In which more audio-work is done; some discussion is had regarding my approach to audio; "sliding block" traps and crystal-making require line-of-sight; the "Crystal Moon" encounter gains some changes; and objects may now drop items.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows items being dropped by a character at their defeat:
(Albeit that this is a somewhat-artificial case: most will likely not drop so much, I expect!)
The week just past was primarily a sound-related week, I feel--but some other things did get done nevertheless!
As just mentioned, perhaps the main thrust of the week just past went towards audio-work: I made various sound effects (although not many that I'll likely keep, I now think), and implemented their use within the game. Further, I enacted more changes still to the underlying sound-handling code.
And besides that, on a game-dev forum I engaged in a conversation about my approach to the inclusion of sound in my "vertical slice". In short, the advice given there was to either aim for good sound, or no sound--poor sound might be a detriment.
As a result, I have some more thinking to do on just how to proceed in the matter...
Moving over to matters of gameplay, two elements of the game were given line-of-sight restrictions in the week just past:
First, where before the player could use the "crystal generation" ability to plop down a mana-crystal anywhere on the screen, they now require a clear line from their ship, and open space for the resultant gem.
And second, the "sliding block" traps now need line-of-sight to the player in order to activate--and thus no longer react to the player from the other side of a wall.
In the Crystal Moon, an encounter is in place that has been--more or less--unchanged since the early days of this dev-log, I believe. Oh, some details have changed: in particular, there have been changes both to the nature of the waves of enemies and to the randomness of said enemies (or lack thereof). But, fundamentally, the pattern has been the same: enter; take a health-gem; get locked in; fight all; and in defeating all, open the door to leave.
In the week just past, however, I made two changes to this sequence: First, the item taken at the start is now a quest-item. And second, at the completion of the encounter a health-gem is now spawned (along with a flare of light).
Speaking of item-spawnings, and as shown in the screenshot above, objects may now drop items on defeat!
This should then allow for things like bosses dropping artefacts, breakables producing powerups, creatures giving health, and so on!
And finally, there were a number of changes, fixes, and tweaks made that don't seem worth detailing here! (Perhaps most saliently, some fairly significant bug-fixes, I do think!)
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
