Summary:
In which another level's first-draft is (pretty much) completed; a start is made to the next pass over the Ossuary's levels; some textures are touched up; linear traps become more prompt; linear traps further become more indicative; an enemy now stops short; the interaction is tweaked between mana crystals and an enemy that takes advantage of them; and some performance issues are addressed.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot comes from the "Dismal Halls" level of the Ossuary Moon, now a bit more filled out:
Naturally, the week just past was once again a level-building week for the most part, albeit with a variety of other tasks besides:
As shown above, the "Dismal Halls" level of the Ossuary Moon has progressed! Indeed, I believe that I have its first draft pretty much complete, including layout, enemy and object placement, and a bit of level-logic. (Confessedly, I have yet to properly arrange most of its room-covers.)
And with that done, I've begun work on the next pass over the levels: completion and polish. This has only just begun, adding to the "Dismal Halls" decorative lines of darker skulls and a depiction of the front-face of a breakable wall.
Now, in working on the level, I came to conclude that various of the in-game objects looked a little over-flat, and thus wanted for another polish-pass. To this end I've touched up the skeletons, the skeletal spike-shooters, the projectiles of said spike-shooters, the "linear traps" (both Ossuary-specific and general-use), the bone-barriers, and the giant skulls from the "Bonehoards" level.
The changes aren't monumental, but I do think that they help. ^_^
Speaking of the "linear traps", I've found them a little unchallenging, and so in the week just past I tweaked their behaviour. Specifically, I've increased their acceleration, allowing them to much more promptly dart at the player. (And concomitantly reduced their maximum speed, now that they reach said speed rather quickly.)
Further, I decided that it was a little unfair that one couldn't see on which axis they would slide, and so have included some logic to vary their spikes to convey this:
Likewise, I made a tweak to the behaviour of the "skeletal spike-shooter" enemy: it now stops a little distance from the player, rather than advancing until it's right on top of them. (The former behaviour made a bit more sense, I feel, when the approach to physics allowed it to push the player along.)
And a final set of tweaks from the week just past was that given to the mana crystals produced by one of the player's "metroidvania abilities" and the response of the "Deceived Acolyte" enemies to those crystals.
I found, you see, that when the Acolytes attempted to use the crystals to empower themselves, two problems were evinced: First, they had a tendency to stop behind the crystals, and thus when they next fired a skull-projectile they destroyed the crystals and damaged themselves. And second, when two were present they had a tendency to get stuck going for the same target-spot in front of the crystal.
To this end, I both adjusted the Acolytes' approach to finding a target-spot and increased the size of the mana-pools produced by the crystals. And indeed, along with a change to their rate of casting when so empowered, I think that the result is rather more effective behaviour from the Acolytes!
On the technical side, I looked into some performance issues in the week just past. I think that I've made some small gains in this, but larger improvements may call for larger changes--likely larger than I intend for the purposes of the demo.
And once again, various tweaks, changes, and fixes were enacted in the week just past that don't seem worth detailing here!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
