Archive:
Preeeetty much finished the Challenging Stage. The Cannon fires boing balls, although you can’t really tell because of the motion blur, the bats have a bunch of splines to follow, the VFX is in, and I’ve finally robbed Jeff’s Camel font! This has popped up in so many C64 demos (and games), that it’s probably one of the most famous things he’s ever done. I was honour bound to steal it at some point. Today’s the day.
I was going to do the attack waves with a Level Sequence, but that locks everything into a fixed time period. Galaga moves on to the next wave as soon as you kill all the enemies, so I need to do the same. Reached for my new best friend, the FoxyTwiddlers, instead.
I use 14 of them. Each spawns bats from an Actor Pool, and tells them which spline to follow. Once they’re spawned, they poll the actor pool and when no more bats are active, they twiddle the next twiddler. Works really well. I could test each wave individually and tweak spawn rates & spline durations, super quickly. Exactly what you need.
Made an animation for the player character as they get on & off the cannon, and a quick idle cycle while they’re using it.
The post process occlusion rendering – the thing that draws a yellow silhouette of the player when they’re behind geometry – looked a bit janky when the player stands on the cannon, so I added a Tag, and some code to tweak the alpha scalar in a Material Parameter Collection, as it gets added / removed. I can hide the yellow silhouette on demand. Surprised I’ve not needed to do it before now, tbh.
And I’ve been a good boy; I added all the audio, rather than save it for a later pass.
I think all that’s left is to tweak the wall geometry – there’s a gap at the top left on my stupid ultra-wide – and maybe add a little screen at the end, to show you the kill percentage. There’ll be an achievement, of course. I’ll need to think of a name for that.
I’ve also written the background music handler – basically ported over what I have in Maenir – and added Phil’s noodles to each map. As expected, it’s made a massive difference, even with the unfinished, 2-minute-long loops.
Never under-estimate how much the music contributes to a game’s feel.
Hangover day. Decided to hunt for bugs and boy… did I found a banger: Gravity in The Bathroom appeared to be messed up, which sort of made sense, this is the room you enter after Ballroom East’s Mario Galaxy style antics. I’d obviously forgotten to clean something up. But what? Cue several hours of head scratching, and stepping through the code.
The culprit? The ControlRotation was left in whatever orientation Ball Room East last used. It should have been zeroed out. My hacks to clamp the character’s falling/floating velocity were completely wrong because they were pointing in the wrong direction. Facepalm
Friends:
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