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Weekly Update - Discrete Dungeon Rooms

3 years ago1,451 words

Another productive week! I revised how rooms and the field camera work this week.

I'm really happy with what I have for the game at the moment! My current aim is to refine what I have into a playable demo consisting of the intro section and the first tutorial island dungeon thing, which I'll show to testers first, then maybe use to run a Kickstarter campaign, if the testers are happy with it and any research I do suggests that releasing a demo alongside a Kickstarter is a good idea. I'll also revise all the 'marketing' images etc at that point - things like the (very outdated) preview video on the main page of this site - and start publicly linking to the Steam page to accummulate wishlists.

I feel close to that point, but everything takes so long! I keep going over the same battles and cutcsenes again and again and again, each time finding new little issues that I need to add to my huge To Do List to be fixed at some point. Then I run through the list, fix most of the stuff, do another test run through the same content, and have to add a bunch more issues that I find. Or things I fix break other things, then they need fixing too!

Still, I feel I'm making consistent progress, and my productivity and focus have been fairly high again this week, so that's good. (Well, on this game at least! I've been neglecting a growing list of other things I really should attend to.)



The most notable thing I've done this week is I've revised the way that the field/dungeons work, somewhat.

They've always been made out of separate 'rooms', but originally there were two camera modes: one which followed your characters fairly closely, so the room boundaries weren't obvious, and another which zoomed out and focused on the current room, shifting when you changed rooms. The close follow camera was the default, but you could switch to the other (or back) by pressing a button.

I've changed that now so that there's only the fixed-to-room camera, though I've also revised the size of the rooms so the camera's about as close as it was during the old close-follow mode (so it's kind of a combination of both):




...You can see from the video and screenshot there that there's some absolutely bizarre visual bug with the ocean shader, which suddenly started happening out of nowhere on Wednesday (I haven't edited the shader or anything I can think is related to it), so that's something that I'll need to look into with absolutely nothing to go on. Always fun when things like this happen!

I personally really like the idea of dungeons made of discrete rooms like this. Many other games have done it - the old Zelda games, for example - and I've always preferred it over the more expansive dungeon layouts in, say, Pokemon, or even MARDEK, as I like the thought of being able to fully explore every nook and cranny, and this kind of layout makes that easier to do and to track.

Plus, from a development standpoint, room-based dungeons are easier (and more fun) to plan and to make, at least for me personally.



I've also updated the minimap (you might need to zoom in on that image by clicking it to make it out). The previous one was based on the terrain, but it was essentially useless. This one only shows the rooms, and the idea is to have a coloured radial bar showing that room's completion progress: purple, which fills with gold as you clear monsters and treasure. It's not fully functional yet - the rooms' exits aren't properly set and the radial bar is set to a random value each time the map refreshes - but when it is, it might replace the monster species completion thing I had a while back. I'm not sure yet though; I could still have both.

Because I changed the sizes of the rooms, I also needed to remake the maps I already have, though that wasn't a big deal as I only have a couple because I've been focusing my time on the game loop rather than content. The Collie's Psychepelago intro area is small - only four rooms before - so that only took about an hour to remake, and I kept the important non-terrain objects on the maps so all the cutscenes and battles still worked as they should. Here's a direct comparison between how this one room that you start the game in looked originally:



And how it looks now:



I prefer the rooms this smaller size because it means I can focus them more. Originally this area had four rooms, but a couple had two event battles in them, which felt cramped. Now it has six smaller rooms, with each important battle given its own room. Feels more significant that way.

(I could have used the old room size but given each battle its own room, but the bigger rooms felt like they had too much empty space if they only had a single battle in them.)

I needed to revise the tutorial dungeon area - the Sprouting Isle - anyway, because the old map was full of issues that'd built up as I'd been changing the mechanics around. The old layout had you travel around the island in a fairly winding way which I felt wasn't ideal for a beginning dungeon; something more linear and obvious seemed better. It shouldn't take too long to remake it, but I started on Friday afternoon, and only got as far as making dummy rooms with important battles in them before I ran out of time (and steam).

I'll also need to give all the dialogue scenes another pass over, to iron out inconsistencies or revise tutorial bits that deal with mechanics that have changed (there's a scene about arousal, for example, which functions completely differently now, so I'll need to completely rewrite that). I'll hopefully be able to do that next week.



There's still a lot to do, but I'm really enjoying working on the game and feel another alpha test is just over the horizon!

As I hinted at earlier though, I've been neglecting other stuff. I mentioned in a post about a month ago that I'd bought this Lego Harry Potter phoenix as a Christmas present for myself:



It arrived ages ago, but it's still sitting in a box on my desk because I haven't found the time to even open it. And that's something supposedly fun that I really want to do! So the other stuff like figuring out which PC to get, replying to messages and emails, or looking into part-time jobs or accommodation, obviously aren't getting the attention they need either.

It's not that I don't have time exactly, more that when I do, I struggle to get started on anything. I'm trying to find ways to get around that.

One thing I tried was going out for a walk, because I haven't in ages and thought it might help somehow. Instead I spent much of the whopping 25 minutes I was out for trying to control an anxiety attack, so that was fun! I was listening to an audio book at the time, but it didn't help. My biggest issue was a visceral fear of anxiety symptoms, of passing out or throwing up or something embarrassing like that, because one time I did essentially pass out while walking due to anxiety - back when I barely understood it, like half my life ago - and my body's apparently been forever conditioned to expect and prepare for that happening again. Annoying.

I need to look for a therapist, but that's another thing I'm putting off. Pfft! Maybe I need to devote a week day to nothing other than these various chores, but I have a strong urge to spend as much time as I can on Atonal Dreams because I'm enjoying it and the next phase feels so close now...



Oh, and I intended to put out music albums both on Bandcamp and YouTube - to the interest of millions, for sure - but I didn't even manage two weeks of that! I'm wondering whether instead to put some of my newer music on YouTube individually rather than as albums... I could put out content more regularly that way, but it's a shame it's unlikely to be interesting to many people.