I wasn’t able to work on the game yesterday so I hope I will be able to make enough changes and improvements to make up for that.
To begin the changes I started trying to find a new font. I had to import them into the game and replace the default font I had so I could see how it looked like within the context of the world and gameplay. I tested a few fonts before I landed on one I really liked. My decision was also informed by the fact that I couldn’t find a reliable way to change the font for all the texts, so I believe I found a font that is both pleasing to look at and easy enough to comprehend.
It took awhile to find something that I was happy with. There are a lot of fonts out there and I hope that the one I found is actually completely free. I did check the licenses but there could always be something I overlooked, anyway it will become a problem if it is a problem.
For awhile now I have been thinking about a way to fix the logic of my melee attack. Since it works in a way that it has to be reset if it is interrupted, I had a macro that I attached to everything that could potentially interrupt it. This wasn’t a good system, if I forget to add it then the melee never works. And every time I added a new action I had to make sure it worked to reset the melee. I checked how many I had and they were all over the place. In order to make it more efficient and easier for myself in the future I decided I needed to stop relying on the resets and reset it within the melee attack itself somehow. So I first worked on removing all the macros from the blueprint, which helped clear up some space. Then I started experimenting with ways I could reset the melee combo without issues.
The thing that I found that worked for me was a retriggerable delay at the end of the attacks, so if the player keep attacking it won’t reset, and no matter what it will reset the attack. Since it always fires upon doing the attack action, it should never fail. After testing it in some fights it worked quite reliably.
I thought about adding color options for the crosshair, but at the moment I don’t see the need for it. The appearance of the crosshair changes based on the target so that should be enough of an indicator for the player.
With there only being three stages I want to improve them as much as I can. Some areas around the trees are very empty, I added some smaller flowers in these areas. I improved the appearance of the dials and the clock objects in the second stage. I made them look more embedded into the world. And I turned some objects that looked like they should be physics objects into physics objects. While working on that I thought it would be a good time to finally go back to improving the physics objects themselves.
Without using some fancy plugin or destruction from the engine I instead just added tiny invisible objects that would become visible and start simulating physics once the object is broken. It will hang out on the ground for a few seconds then disappear into the ground.
After some testing it looked good enough. It is really just a small detail that has no impact on gameplay but it looks like to see some pieces break off an object. Since my logic requires me to manually assign the kind of objects the broken pieces will be, it was a bit of a hassle but didn’t take too much time. I went over all the physics objects in all three stages. There wasn’t as many as I thought there were. Some issues with certain objects were encountered but I was able to fix that by making sure some objects that are acting strangely will break right away.
For the third stage I thought the walls were a bit bare so I added paintings, got some free ones online. At least I think they are free, there I go again hoping that the ‘free’ things I get are actually free. The sounds while traversing the castle were also too soft so I made it a bit louder. And the landing sound was inconsistent so I am currently tracking speed while falling and using that to be the multiplier for the sound of the landing. That should be good enough.
There are tons of tiny improves I still wanna make. I still have to see if there’s a way I can make the name selection have a search functionality so you don’t have to scroll down to far the list to find the name you want. I still need to make improvements to some option menus. For the stages I will check if there is more I want to add to deepen the story as well.
GoldenGratus Games 