Whoough boy, lots of exciting little giblets. Since the last update, i have:
-Added a spellcasting UI in all of its glory
-Added a competent spellcasting system and several test spells (i had a blast drawing up these little card art images). The test spells work wonderfully, but you can't see them in action because GIFs are a discipline of sorcery i haven't figured out yet.
-Made it possible to easily spawn graphical effects
-Same for sound effects too
-Added a placeholder system that handles explosions of all shapes and sizes. This barely works until i'll get around to figuring out how to efficiently implement tile breaking and durability and such...
-Reworked damage code to account for different damage types and resistances, as well as knockback resistance
-Forgot to mention it last time but i made a few tile entities besides traps, like doors and storage cabinets
-Added a cute little crosshair when casting, a spyglass when inspecting (right now just tells you an object's name) and set up a script that controls cursors
-Screwed around with the melee attack system and now they're way more interesting and even satisfying. Oh how happy i am to see confirmation that i actually am capable of polishing things down to make them feel more satisfying. When you're designing a game and everything is placeholder, you can't help but worry that you're making a shit of piece with your trash game. Will this actually feel fun to play??? Well maybe it will. Maybe i can make it fun to play later, if i could make this tiny bit of combat fun just now.
-Took another stab at FOV/Obscurement system, successfully failed at several more attempts to innovate an entirely new system into existence, then had a brain blast and smoothed out a few eyesores in the current system which made it much much better and possibly way faster too. Win?
-Played around with enemy AI a little. Writing proper enemy AI is a big undertaking that i'm hoping to gnaw into eventually, but for now i just needed the basics to test the spells and melee attacks.
-Started work on level generation. This one is the current big challenge, and i want to do at least a basic version of it pronto, because:
1. I don't feel safe about adding lots of gaudy tiles and items and systems until i know for certain the game as a whole can function at least on a basic level, and that includes level generation;
2. Some important planned thematic and gameplay features hinge on level generation, so it will be a big, important undertaking and therefore needs attention early;
3. It's fun to implement hehehehe
-Found a videogame called Afterplace and didn't do any development for a while because i was busy gaming. This devlog is now hijacked. Go check out Afterplace now. It is a fascinating indie game made by one person for mobile devices in 2022. And then ported to PC in July this year. It has like 36 reviews on Steam, so it is truly a secret game for the knowers. But GOD it's good stuff. It's an adventure game, takes like 10 hours to beat, toys with the concept of what a videogame should be all the way through. Not ~necessarily~ in some crazy Undertale way, but rather, it's built out of the thoughts you normally tend to discard when thinking about making your own game. "What if i add THIS? No way, wait, that'd be inconvenient for the player". "But what if i add THAT? No, no, it'd take lots of effort and no other games do it, probably for a reason". It's a detail-packed, lovingly-made game that feels INCREDIBLY FRESH because it is composed of design decisions you don't normally find in games, big and small. And it WORKS! It works because of all the love and effort that was put into it! As someone interested in game design, i find Afterplace fascinating. It's also a good game in general, thanks to great plot, character writing and focus on exploration without holding the player's hand. Ungh
