This week was very busy for me in general, considering I had to work on making sure we had a build to submit for the beta over the weekend, after which I had to start working on implementing features that were missing and starting polish.
For the beta build, I had to implement all the boss animations so that the boss fight was finally fully functional and didn't just have Matt's face on it as a placeholder. Because I hadn't done them before, I also had to implement the projectiles for the bullet hell sequence and the pillar attacks. In the end, the boss fight was finally done, with the only things left to make were some small cutscenes that will be done next week.
I also added tutorial text for all ability upgrades, but it was implemented very quickly and will be refined later in the week. This is to give proper tutorialization to abilities as players were very confused in previous builds, but it no longer became an issue once this was in.
After making these features, doing some bugfixes, I sent off a build for people to playtest. The playtest feedback we got matched with what we already knew, so there weren't a lot of changes/features to add that weren't already planned.
After taking a bit of a break after the beta was submitted, I got right into doing some polish work for the game. I wanted to make the map, but I needed to wait until the changes made to it were finalized first, so I started on the smaller features that needed to be done first. The first thing I did was make hits on enemies a lot clearer than they were before, as knockback was only applied before. Now, whenever the player hits enemies, they will flash white, indicating that they have been hit. This should make the feedback a lot clearer to players and make attacking feel more responsive.
Next, I overhauled how tinder and tinder Caches were collected. Before, tinder was automatically given to you when you killed an enemy, and you just had to run into a tinder cache to collect them. This wasn't very interactive, so I made tinder caches crates that you had to break with your sword in order to collect the tinder within them. At the same time, I created tinder objects that would spawn whenever you destroyed a tinder cache or defeated an enemy, exploding into a pile of tinder every time. This makes it so the player has to physically collect the tinder themselves, so that they have a better idea of how much they actually gain, as simply having the value change isn't very noticeable. An added benefit of this is that it also adds feedback to when enemies die, which was sorely lacking before.
Overall, no issues to address, as everyone knows what they have to do before the end of next week so that we can finish our game. We're tight on time but we should be able to have everything we want done at a reasonable pace.
For the next week, I have more minor features to implement, namely making the keys for doors into levers, and making the map. I also have to implement sound effects and music and polish the UI, but as these are all smaller tasks I should be able to finish them without issues, so long as the rest of the team manages to get their tasks in on time.
For the last time, until next time.
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