Dev Diary - 2 Jan

21 DEC 2020

Given that my artist created over twenty variations of rescuable crew members, I felt a little bad only needing less than half of that, so I figured it would be fun to add a randomizer to their faces. Now, each time you play, the list of crew members to save is different, and they are fully implemented with new hitboxes, heights, and UI elements.

22 DEC 2020

I know this is the art milestone, but there are onesy-twosy things that I really want fixed before moving on. For the most part even the art is done, so when I see an egregious issue I tend to want to get it out of the way immediately. One mistake is that I wanted the player to be safe bumping into enemies, so a lot of them face the wrong direction which gives them a worse visual range. The trouble with that is if you move slowly enough you can just shoot them on the edge of the screen without them turning around. After a bit of fine-tuning, enemies now turn around if they can’t see the player but get shot.

28 DEC 2020

Got a lot of work done on the Steam Store Page, so the deadline feels all the more real. With this, I’m pushing hard to reach the end goal, but I’m quality-assuring along the way. One issue I had a lot that was really stressing me out since almost the inception of its creation is that occasionally the fall damage wouldn't happen, and even worse is it would sometimes apply twice. That was really really frustrating. Knowing what I do now, I decided it was better to just scrap the previous script for it altogether and recreate it to work properly. Playtesting so far shows that it works 100% of the time now.

I also finished implementing the crew, so they cheer when rescued and disappear when off camera. I considered a few different ways to prove to the player that the crew member was freed, but the original placeholders just turned green, and I didn’t like the idea of the actual assets just.. Standing there happily after being rescued. That would feel really out of place. I may want to tweak it so that there is a timer so they don’t literally poof the millisecond they aren’t on camera, but otherwise I think it’s a huge improvement.

29 DEC 2020

More cleanup before the big project, the boss fight. I did manage to make it that rescued crew have to be off camera for a bit before disappearing so it isn’t so jarringly instant, and I also gave certain enemies a delay before they can attack. A lot of these ones are in good positions, but the natural flow of play wouldn’t have the player notice them until it was too late, and I found that a bit too punishing. Ones in these positions have a small delay before attacking, which is better than just starting them turned around every time.

I did get started on the final boss fight, but right now it’s mostly with tinkering on how to make it work and when to have it start. A lot of it was just getting it up and running, so the next little while will be dedicated to actually making it interesting. Good luck with that, eh?

30 DEC 2020

Continued work on the boss fight. Working on having a balanced fight that is challenging without being punishing. This is the only experience the player has gone through so far that requires them to alternate crouching and standing in a single encounter, so hopefully by the time they reach the boss they are comfortable enough to handle both at the same time. I also took a bit of extra time to add an easter egg/achievement for hitting the wrong spot too many times. Kinda excited to see how that works out.

31 DEC 2020

I now have a phase two on the boss fight. One thing that was important was I didn’t want his crouching/standing needs being too repetitive because it is meant to be random, but occasionally the 50/50 would flip the coin so often in one direction that you could kill the boss without ever knowing it could switch heights. That was annoying. So, I added a bit of logic to not allow it to stay shooting the same direction more than 2 times. Stage two is mostly cosmetic, but increases the speed at which it alternates. Playtesting will be very very important because I’ve been fighting the boss repeatedly for hours every single day so of course he seems too easy, but I imagine others will feel differently.

On a separate note, I also added prison doors to the crew so there’s something to actually.. Look at. Rather than them just standing perfectly still, they are behind a force field that deactivates on rescue.