When I decided to cutback on the voice lines I realized I can create a speaker, a narrator. Similar to what Super Giant did for Bastion and Transistor. This way I don’t have to create many lines for all the characters, and I can have a few interesting lines from the narrator that is speaking. It will be some time or maybe immediately that the player will find out who is speaking.
When I recorded the first line I didn’t like how normal it sounded. After some research I found a way to add reverb on Audacity. It is a simple effect that makes the line sound as if it was spoken in a large empty room. This adds to the solitary feeling of the narrator and the player, hopefully it comes off as that. Then I quickly learned how to use the subtitle system in unreal. I just had to plug it in a dialogue object and create a “conversation” between the player and the speaker. It works well, but it could be covered by some UI elements.
The whip has gone under many improvements. I finally went with the same logic I used for the melee so it would flow better. It didn’t feel great that you had to wait for the whip animation to almost finish in order to get to the next one. Now you can chain the whip attack so it looks a lot smoother and natural (in a sense). I tweaked the timings to make sure it transitioned to the next attack nicely. It wasn’t as easy as the melee attacks because I couldn’t get the timing right at first, but eventually I found a timing rhythm to the combo.
Instead of having the journal appear right at the start of the level, I instead made it a mechanic you would find in the tutorial. This was because it was covering the subtitle, and I don’t wanna bombard the player with too much information in the beginning.
I tweaked the way the same gave functioned worked, since I’ll be more concerned with the number of times the player has died rather than if they had died at all. After I changed the logic it messed up how I loaded into the world, and I think it’s because I load the player in a lot earlier now. It doesn’t put the player in the right place in the editor, but in normal play it works fine. I made sure that the save system worked on every level. As far as I could tell it worked fine.
While testing the second level I found an issue with the boss trigger. I didn’t realize I was activating the trigger after a timeline finished. So if the player were to run straight for the door after they solved the puzzle the boss would not activate. I moved up the even to make sure the trigger was activated immediately as soon as the puzzle was solved.
Clarity in games is very important to me. I need to remember that if I have an audio cue I should have a visual cue with it as well. There is a cue the golem boss has that was only sound, to make it clearer I added visual effects on top of it. There might be people who don’t play with sound at all, so it is important to be able to communicate important details in several ways. This cue was also able to overlap itself, so I made sure it didn’t happen anymore by adding a do once node that would reset when it was done playing.
The second boss seemed to have a lot of sound glitches, too many playing I believe. I removed some of the sound effects from its attacks and I think it helped the issue if it didn’t remove it entirely.
Tomorrow I will be having fun adding more voice lines to the game and figuring out how to add a setting option for people to turn the subtitles off. The death count variable is important because that is what I will be using to determine the order of the voice lines.
GoldenGratus Games 