Toned down the reflection of the material on the player’s shoulder plate and bracers. It should be easier to render something less reflective, but at least it is still shiny. Used new animations for the shooting. The Paragon Gideon character has really done well for me. I have used so much of his animations and particle effects. Made sure there was a unique montage for when the player uses an enhanced shot.
Thought for quite awhile how to add another visual indicator that the player has switched lantern settings. I couldn’t figure out anything new I wanted to add to the character so I simply made the image beside the resource bar larger. That should be clear enough when the player switches. It plays a sound as well. I needed to put logic so that the player can’t use the new powers straight away. They should only be available at certain levels. So I simply added a new integer variable that will go up with every finished stage. I feel really stupid because I couldn’t figure out at first how to place it so it would stop the flow properly.
I updated the save data so take in the new variable, both saving and loading. And made sure that the number goes up when a boss is defeated.
Added two new animations for the boss. They don’t particularly do anything different but it is nicer to have variety when fighting it. It is basically just adding flavor to the summoning of the pillars again and again. This will probably be my last large boss of the game. Everything else should not be too big.
Found a bug where the shot would not go towards the boss because the camera was compensating for how large it was, and it was firing towards where the camera was looking instead of the target. I fixed it by getting the vector of what the player was locked on to.
It’s always messing adding a new input, but I have been wanting to add more fluff to the world besides the items and tutorials. So I added a simple page of a “journal” that appears when the stage starts. And the player can open and close it at any time. It talks about the current “case” the player is on. This will help flesh out some of the story as well. It was tricky getting the right size, making sure it didn’t take up the entire screen space. I had to make sure as well that the journal would close at times when it should be on the screen, such as if the player gets hit or a “cutscene” is playing.
Had to make sure there was some story for the second stage as well. It’s still a draft for now, but I’ll probably just improve on what story I have now instead of trashing it altogether. I also had to make sure the player knew about how to switch to the new abilities after defeating the first boss. It was hard to figure out where to put this message because putting it in the first stage would hurt the flow of ending the level. I figured it would be good enough to put it in the start of the second level. Force the player to see it and read it so they know.
With the clock stage mostly done, before I move on to making the third stage I need to create a foundation for the ending “cutscene” to every level. When the boss fight ends the player simply moves on to the next stage, but I want to see how I can add more, something interesting before moving on. At least that way it doesn’t progress so abruptly to a new level.
GoldenGratus Games 