Hempuli's blog

Today’s stream was spent mostly on cutscenes. I’ve finally finished the new beginning of the game and after today’s work the new content is connected properly the rest of it. However, there’s a lot of little tweaking, finetuning and bugfixing to be done everywhere, and those were another big thing to work on this time. I feel that I got a nice amount of stuff done but there are now many rooms and features that’ll require decoration and tweaking to feel really “finished”. I’ll try not to spend too much stream time on that, though, especially considering there’s a whole new area to work on!

I went and finished the boss in one go! It still lacks some visual polish, but the fight can be fought from start to finish and the boss pattern is fully realized (although maybe in a need of some tweaking). I also implemented conveyor belts today. Very productive, so productive in fact that I think I’ll stream again this week, on Friday or Sunday.

Bonus funnies:

So, my 7drl entry ended up being late due to me being busy on the weekend, which kind of drained my will to keep working on it. Maybe one day…! I’m pretty happy with what I have now, though, because I implemented many features I had never done before, it’s cool.

I was really tired after all this theatre stuff last week so the stream started early and also ended somewhat quickly. However, I managed to implement a pre-boss cutscene and maybe-kinda settle on the design of the boss! Also added a button to change the level editor’s background colour to magenta, woo!

No picture today because I didn’t really do anything that visual, but next wednesday should be better in that regard!

I’ve had very little time to work on games this week, and next week looks to be even worse in that regard; I’m working in a student theatre group and our we’ll have our premiere and the rest next Tuesday. Woo!

Anyway! I’ve taken what little time I have to work on the 7drl thing, because it’s fun to take a crack at making a “pure” roguelike (or at least something imitating one). MMF2 really isn’t up to the task, causing slowdown even with just a bit of raycasting & pathfinding (especially pathfinding), but in a weird way I enjoy having the push the program to its limits.

I now have moving enemies with different movement patterns and speeds, field-of-view and a system for enemies noticing players and so on. I was really glad to find out that making the enemies collide with each other wasn’t quite as terribly hard as I feared in this specific case. I probably won’t have time to finish anything actually playable since Sunday will be reserved for theatre stuff, but there’re some features I’d love to see working before the 7drl. Biggest of these is some kind of an “skill system”, in that the player can affect the enemies with spell-like skills and vice versa. We’ll see how smoothly that’ll go.

After such a long while I ended up making some new traditional arts. I’ve been doing comics for our student magazine over the year, but this time I also made the cover art. The theme was “future”, although a lunar lander isn’t really future at this point. Psychologists in moon definitely are, though! It was a lot of fun making this and I’m happy with the result. Inks and pencil, editing done with computer.

7drl, aka 7-day roguelike challenge, is upon us again! I’ve been meaning to join this event for at least 3-4 years now, always ending up a bit too unmotivated to work start anything. However, this time around I have not one but two ideas, the latter of which being a bit large to be making in a week.

Here’s some extra info about 7drl if you’re interested!

I had already implemented the A* pathfinding, but added walls and a text engine on-stream. ESA 2 got some pre-boss work done as well as a feebleish attempt at a boss sprite; maybe I’ll figure out a better idea in a week. The little stream visualizer also got some bugs fixed; it now displays comments as well!

Anyway, I’ll try to finish something based on my first RL idea before the end of the week, and have an extra stream about it on Friday.

Today’s stream included me making a tiny program that displays the stream-watchers as tiny squares with faces. It was fun to make! I’m probably going to extend it into something larger.

In terms of “actual” game progress, I added a new room to the metroidvania and implemented a new type of object, Customtrigger, which can alert the game of custom, manually coded events. I tested it immediately with a tiny cutscene related to another square, seen above. Also tested the jetpack/double jump powerup; it needs tweaking but it’s something. Next week we’ll hopefully get to a boss fight!