Summary: In which level two's model sees more work; various bits of progress on the level are made; more writing is done, both lore and otherwise; some convenience debug features are added; a number of bugs-fixes and minor changes are made; and a side-game is released!
Greetings and salutations!
Once again, I have no Door-to-the-Mists-related screenshot this week: the work of the week just past was again focussed on a great many little changes, fixes, and suchlike, none of which really make for much of a screenshot, I feel.
Instead, have a release trailer for my side-game, Night River:
The week just past was a busy one, I feel! Not only did I do quite a bit on A Door to the Mists, but I also released the above-mentioned little side-game, Night River!
Do you remember that I mentioned last week, I believe, that I thought that the modelling for level two might have been done?
I was wrong!
As it turned out, there were a great many little fixes, changes, and touch-ups to do. There were broken walls that had not yet been edged. There were curbs that had visible gaps when seen from some directions. And a variety of other little things to be done.
Is it finished now? I don't know--the next export-import of the level from Blender and into the game may tell...
Beyond that, I made a bit more progress with the level, adding or fixing things for which I had been waiting to have the updated level. Few of these are worth detailing here, I feel, but it is nice to have them finally done.
One that might be worth mentioning is that the level now has an actual "exit" object. This means both that the player can now move to the next level once the objective in this one is done, and that the player can no longer step out of the bounds of the level and fall into the void. ^_^
Perhaps more interestingly, I did a bit of writing in the week just past.
Some of this was small: adding a better description to the "distant light" in level two, or adding a line that I had missed in level one.
I also added text for a guard-log that may be found in level two. It's nothing terribly exciting, but I feel that it adds a bit of "life"--or a sense of life that once was--to the level.
But perhaps most saliently, I think that I've finished the second and final lore-entry for level two: a tale of desperate magic against a plague. What was the result of that magic? Well, if you discover the entry in the level you may find out...
On the technical side, I added two debug features to the game proper (that is, as opposed to the level-editor; the version that has the main menu, and plays cutscenes, etc.) for the sake of convenience:
With three levels in the game now (including the prologue), it can become tiresome to play through everything before just to test something in a given level. To that end, the game now allows me to press one of the number-keys to skip to the desired level!
When debugging, it can be a problem that the game-proper confines the mouse to the boundaries of its window. (Especially as this confinement seems to persist even when the window is no longer in focus.) Thus, I've added a key-press that toggles mouse-confinement, thus freeing the mouse for debugging tasks.
And through all of this, I encountered and attended to myriad bug-fixes and little changes! Most of this is once again not worth detailing here, I feel. One particular issue--a rather puzzling inconsistency in text-nodes--is still being investigated.
Finally, as mentioned above, I released something this week! That something is my little side-game, "Night River". It's a short, simple, spooky experience, in which the player boats down a black-glass river and discovers the various ghosts that may be seen along the way.
If you're interested, you should find it here: https://thaumaturge-art.itch.io/night-river
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^