This week I dove head first into the complaints that people had over the course of the demo and built out new systems to add replayability.  It's been a fun week for me with heavy code overhauls to the core pillars of the game.  That might sound scary, but I love taking apart my old code and rebuilding it to be sturdier.  Let's talk about it!

Art

From the art side, Ref has been working on new level content for the next 3 levels.  I mentioned last week that we're spending time nailing down the look and feel of all 3 levels at once to get a sense of the project's scope and where it'll go.  Here are the results:

The basic walker enemy for the farm level.  I think that it strikes a perfect balance of scary diseased monster and ref's kind of cute pixel style

The basic orc for level 4.  These guys contrast the white snow rather well, and I love their brutish design. the wolf pelt is a great addition!

We've also been working on environmental hazards and things that make the world more unique.  Weve come up with mountains that spew lava, burning furnaces, and these large caves full of mystery.  There's been a lot of animating to do for them and it came out rather well!

Finally we added a little surprise for the player.  The bear traps are no longer just set dressing. they can really hurt!

Programming

Like I said, for programming this has been a really fun week.  I've been experimenting with game play mechanics for each level to shake up their feel.  We added little volcano bursts that attack the player, and the aforementioned bear traps to keep the player aware of his environment.  I have a really great idea for the level 3 hazards, but they're still a secret at the moment because I'm experimenting with a new form of damage for them this weekend! All I'll say is I hope you like breathing toxic fumes!

While this was going on, I also took time to continue building out unique events for the player.  Last week I finished making modifications to the enemy manager that lets me inject random events like enemies running across the screen or spawning specific types in a large mob.  This week I've built out some more event triggers that inject new challenges when the player interacts with them.  

While I was doing this, I also realized that I needed a way of bussing the events into the game.  This forced me to take apart my resource spawn system and make it more robust.  Levels can now spawn chests and barrels that contain loot, but they can also spawn "events" which will appear and remain on the map for the player once they discover them.  There was quite a bit of required to get it working but I'm happy with the outcome.

Basically I moved the loot tables in my resources nodes up to the tile map itself and I added some customization options like: will the item remain on the map or get refreshed when player moves away, or will it dispose of itself or will the resource node handle it.  THese little improvements also let me inject events at will, so I think I'll start randomizing and adding new events at higher difficulties to keep the game fresh! 

Finally, as the week wrapped up, I also managed to tackle a bug that's been plaguing me since the playtest! For some reason when players pick the stalwart/jittery tree, sometimes the ui would get stuck and let the player endlessly click the button for those powerups.  THey would get accepted forever, letting them stack the power indefinitely before picking something else.  For the longest time I couldn't reproduce it, but this week I finally cracked it.

My stalwart/jittery classes subscribe to a static event that let's them show a level up animation in the ui.  This event requires a reference to the canvas.  When the player gets these powerups we find the canvas, cache it, then subscribe to the event.  The trouble started when the player beat a level and started another round.  I realized foolishly that I was never unsubscribing to the event when I broke down the level, so a reference to this class remained in memory.  This was a memory leak, but what's worse, is that it referenced a canvas that was destroyed.  When the player started another round, and chose an instance of stalwart/jittery, the one from the last level was still there listening to events and trying to perform the level up animation.  It would fail because it's reference to the canvas was resulting in a null point error.  This was a really insidious bug and I was just glad I was able to fix it!

Next Week

Next week Ref will be wrapping up work on tile sets hopefully.  We have one more level to build out and a basic enemy to generate.  I'm going to take my time with it and build out the level slowly because it will truly be a final set piece for the game.  At the same time, I'm going to continue building out events to spice up the game, and work on the new system for the third level.  I've already found several ways I want to use it so I feel like it's a must.

Till next time!