Red's Wrapup (March Edition) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, lots of progress to share this time around, though it's not very sexy (unless you're into coding/game design I suppose.) 

I've successfully added three major features to Pod's New Program:

• Hacking minigame stages can have more than one boss enemy.
• Defeating different bosses can lead to different dialogue/animation scenes.
• Enemies can be spawned in waves based on player position, or when previous groups of enemies are destroyed.

It may not seem like much, but the second feature in particular was pretty tricky to get right. There's lots of "easy" ways to do it; hardcoding level exits, messy if/than statements, unnecessary duplicates of boss objects, etc, but it was important to me to find a way to do it in a way that was clean (good practice for future projects) and expandable (to keep this project manageable).

The video clips demonstrate all these features and a couple minor additions: effects for when enemies spawn during gameplay, and a debug ui element that will dynamically tell me the name of the Unity scene name that's currently running (just for testing purposes, to make sure the branching paths are working properly since the dialogue scenes are still largely placeholders).

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PyXg0zixx5NHu0wABDZfq0zmzgM9ciP4/view?usp=share_link
  
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MTR1y271rWIQNWSxr_y6S6tw-pDPnFy0/view?usp=share_link
  
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BUMHNzpkpT29F_ZudEHsyG8zXk653KTp/view?usp=share_link 

I had also noticed that some effect objects were not being cleaned up properly which could cause a performance issue, so I took care of that as well.

So what's next?

I still need to do another art pass to better develop the branching paths and player options, and I'd like to do some preliminary work figuring out how the Gallery is going to work.

I'm on the cusp of being able to add more enemy types and expand the overall level variety. The next major build should be a lot more interesting.

Still feel like I'm on track to finish the whole thing by the end of the year, but I'm hoping to have more visuals to share soon.

I'm also still working little by little on the Samus animation, but I'm at the stage where I'm converting all the 2D elements into meshes and it's pretty tedious. More on that soon!

Last thing, I'm really trying to get back in the swing of sketching for practice more often, so keep an eye out for separate posts for that. :)

I think that's about it for this update, thanks for sticking around and I'll see you again soon!

-Red