Spent some time playing around with the boss area, making sure the boss doesn’t approach the player until they enter the room, I just went with a giant invisible barrier that gets removed once the trigger is activated. I’m sure there are better ways but this is the quickest and cheapest way I found so far. I also changed the animation for the attack mid-air because the original one was a horizontal swipe it would be hard to hit things underneath. The one I replaced it with is a vertical slash, so it’s more consistent. Optimization is very important especially if I wanna reach the widest amount of player base in the future, this is to make sure the game doesn’t need high end machines to run it. I looked to the textures and reduced their maximum size, some of them were 4K textures so hopefully this should help with the smoothness of the game.
I thought a lot about what was the main mechanic or the most fun part of the game so far, and currently I believe it is the whip. It’s all technically powered by the lantern, but the versatility of the whip is quite exciting. I’ve had a problem for awhile with the whip and its pulling mechanic. It only pulled objects towards the player, and that didn’t do much. Using majority of my brain power for the day I was able to rearrange some of the logic for the whip and add a few changes to it so now the player can control where the object will go by pulling on it and looking at any direction. There’s a small window where the player can decide where the object will go. I’m hoping that this will be a skill to master, and simply have fun with. Now that the whip has more uses there are more options besides pushing.
Next I want to try having a more dynamic camera, one that pushes in or pulls out depending on the situation. And maybe just maybe I’ll finally get back to saving, with loading, checkpoints, autosaves, etc.
GoldenGratus Games 