Valchion - Game Development Continues. Puzzle Cubes and Holographic Exits

Welp, it's been quite awhile since my last update, but I continue to work on this. I'm focusing on map generation and fixing features, mainly. I feel like I might be able to do this and get the game done relatively quickly, so development should hopefully speed up a bit. In any case, I'll work on this until it's finished, regardless of how long it takes (if it's up to me, haha).




Today I worked on refining maps and adding a block that you can shoot to roll around. The block will have puzzle applications, mainly, and will probably be used mostly in the sewers / subway zones. Seeing it makes me think of a large, heavy block that requires something a bit more powerful to flip. That might be an interesting mechanic.

Map Design

I waver a bit when it comes to consistency for the "forward edge" areas of the maps. You should be able to see walls and things on maps, but they can obscure the visuals of the closest edge on maps, which is why I've been leaving them out (and so it's just kind of a "cross-section" visually where the map ends). Not having walls can be problematic, however, since there are bottomless pits in the game, so you don't know automatically where you can and can't step. Maybe I'll have some sort of holographic warning plane to tell you where you can't / shouldn't step.

I forgot, I also added arrows indicating where map exits are. Hoorah. This is obviously useful for telling you where you can exit on the maps, and helps to clear up the confusion between a dead end or a wall and a map exit. They look nice, I think, if a little messy. It might be worth it to consider changing the colors of the exits depending on if you've visited them before or not. That would help with exploration, since the map system I implemented doesn't show the correlation between maps (i.e. which exits lead to which maps).

I also optimized the GUI drawing code a tiny bit. I found out that I was drawing the GUI multiple times (once in the overlay scene's pre_draw, and another in the scene's post_draw). Cutting one of those out helped to keep the game running at 60 FPS on my computer. However, I'd like it to have a lot of buffer when it comes to FPS - this game isn't really that visually demanding, so I want to continue to try optimizing to eek out as many frames as I can.


Anyway, thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll be able to keep up development!