I updated the save points and also the flowers in the castle so the whip can interact with them. It is a big improvement as it makes the whip important in situations where the player will want to reach a flower without having to go near it.
For the previous level I’ve been using the fog from the engine instead of the custom fog I made before. So I did the same for this. I removed the fake fog and put a green exponential fog. As it did for the other stages it has become less dark. This means I could lessen the brightness of the flowers and also I lowered the default intensity of the lantern. The area looks more menacing with a blanket of green. I even changed the god rays to reflect the new color of the outside.
The AI for the boss needed to be updated as well so it does random tasks. I don’t know why I didn’t implement it before, it is such a simple change. For some reason it didn’t bother me until the fourth boss that the AI would chase, strafe, chase, strafe, and so on. I improved the visuals and special attacks all around. The boss’ health bar needed to reflect the current look so I made sure it matched.
One of the special attacks was a small circle, but it was barely an inconvenience. I tested out what it would be like as a long rectangle and it is much more threatening. Switched out the sphere collision which an appropriate box collision and the attack was fun to dance and dodge around.
A lot of my blueprints lack comments so I spent some time leaving comments to at least remind me of why I put it there. I do so much I need to look out for my future self who shouldn’t have to remember everything past me did.
I found a bug where if you switch powers while blocking the mesh on the left arm would not change in scale. It was because of a certain sequence of events that made the mesh change scale into what would be the small shield. I fixed it by creating a new variable that kept track of the current scale that the lantern power was on.
The descriptions of the items needed updating, so I put them through Grammarly and added some more details to certain objects. There aren’t that many items in this level which is fine. I didn’t want to give too much away.
Changed the music to the track I had made a few days ago. I wonder if people will notice the subtle differences in the tracks.
The textures of the special attack didn’t look nice because they got stretched too thin. I replaced the texture with one of the fire textures which looks fine when it repeats. Then I made sure the new line attack I made grew in size (width-wise). I love using timelines as delays. It works so well for me at least.
While testing spawn points and camera angles for the boss I accidentally spawned two of the bosses and they actually targeted each other. Their AI didn’t allow them to attack but it did allow them to move around each other. I have taken note of that and am wondering if I should use this for something or do something on the side for fun.
There is still work to be done on this stage. The camera is a big problem when the entire level rotates. I’m wondering what’s the best thing I can do about that.
GoldenGratus Games 