Archive:
Phil delivered the final masters for the main music, which I normalised, topped and tailed, and dropped in. I’m so used to playing the game with the minute long samplers that it’s a bit odd playing with the full versions. Has changed the feel, in a good way.
Have to say, the background music for Sandy’s is chef’s kiss, I absolutely adore that little Casio drumbeat.
Whilst I was on the audio train, I started adding missing audio to the rooms in Sandy’s, and fixing up the Pygame Snake room so it’s always facing the correct way, regardless of which of the three doors you come in through. Was a bit fiddly, as the Screw rotates the room, so you need a certain orientation not to break the thing.
Added the first Boom Box to the initial Gilby level, which uncovered a bug in the movement. Fixed that, but then I realised I had another problem: I was going to have the Gilby rooms unlock sequentially, regardless of which door you came through, but it dawned on me that you could leave some paint behind and then never get back to collect it, so that’s not going to work. They’ll have to be tied to specific doors. That’s going to make the difficulty ramp a bit tricky; the player might hit them in any order. Bugger.
One of the mini-games in Lumo was loosely based on Devil Dice. You stood on a rotating cube, and had to match the face colour to a spot on the ground, within a time limit. I always liked that, so today I remade it.
Like the first game, you have to stand on it to activate it. I’d purposefully avoided that up to now; I’ve not worried about restricting myself to using one button in this game, so there’s been no need to go back to that mechanic. Makes this a bit of a throwback, but it works.
The maths properly fried my brain though – it’s more complicated than the first game, the camera can be facing any direction – so I cheated. I’m using a second, dynamically spawned actor, as a pivot for the rotations. Reduces the problem to a simpler lerp…
Veeeery nearly finished with the Rotating Cube. I just have the player animations left to add.
For lolz, I used the same layout as the final challenge in the first game, except this time you have to do it four times, matching a colour in each corner. I think I’ll use it one more time in Nu-Antesher, to unlock a Gilby room.
Quite tempted to do an entire Saturday Night Fever floor, but that’d probably have fit better in Moonbas…
My little home server popped. So much for the 100 pound AliExpress mini-computer! I was hoping to drop my laptop in to replace it, but after a few hours of faff, I had to give up. Either the Eero wasn’t port-forwarding traffic to it, or the laptop was dropping the packets, I couldn’t work out which. Have ordered a new PC, but that’s a few days away, which means I’m without source control until it arrives. I’m riding bareback…
I did get the player animations in for the Rotating Cube, but there seems to be an issue with everything I import onto the Player Character’s skeleton since the engine upgrade; the left foot is twisted. Need to work out a way to fix those, in editor.
A job for another day… Today’s been rubbish.
Thought I’d try the Switch version, docked, on the Big Telly, and whoah… that was a lot slower than handheld. Took a lot of fiddling with console variables, but I think I’ve got something reasonable. I can’t get full 1080p resolution, so it’s upscaling from 1340x756, and I had to drop to FXAA antialiasing, but the results are about as good as I think I’m going to get. There’s a bit of light bleed between the walls and the floor, which doesn’t look great, but it’s mostly 30 frames-per-second, or above. It might be worth dropping handheld mode down to FXAA as well. It might claw back a few more frames…
Added a new room, with a black hole that blows you about.
And I put the Rotating Cube into Nu-Antesher.
Also heard from the publisher this afternoon; there’s talk of a Collector’s Edition (oooh!) and we’re going to pin-the-tail on a date to announce the game. Finally! (Not that it’s the world’s best kept secret, at this point, but it’ll be nice to be able to Blog about it on the website…)
Added the final two interactive bits to Nu-Antesher, removed one of the areas I wasn’t using, and added in some vertical columns with paint on. All it needs are the Gilby rooms, to hook up the doors, and it’s done.
I also added a little save icon that flashes up on-screen to let you know there’s disc activity (iirc, this is a requirement on console), but er, it looks like a visual glitch. My save game is 2.8KB atm, so it’s basically on-screen for a frame before disappearing. I’ve stuck a 100ms delay on it for now, but I think I’ll end up swapping out the cassette icon for a spinning throbber. That might look less like something’s broken…
It was worth adding because it made me think a bit harder about how I’m saving the game. This morning, it was doing the same thing as the first game; saving as you move between rooms. But I’ve got larger rooms, with more events in, so I’m being a bit more aggressive, and saving as soon as an inventory item, or zone event happens.
And I think I’ll have the “Warp To Hub” button active on the pause screen, all the time. It does risk people walking through empty rooms a few times, but that’s probably offset by the freedom.
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