Weekend Update! (Patreon)

Judging by the poll, hard modes weren't as popular as I'd thought! I didn't think a majority would want 'em, but I thought a sizable minority might. I expected around 1/3 support, but it looks more like 1/5 - 1/4. I'm going to go ahead and include a hard mode for 0.6.2, but depending on its reception, it may be the last one. I've already put most of the machinery I need in place, so it won't be a huge additional investment of development time.

Since I last checked in, I've mostly been writing plugin code, but I finally finished it today. I'm currently sitting at about 1.3k lines of code (including comments and JSDoc stuff) across 4 plugins. 

Flu Minigame Changes

I rewrote the flu minigame to use plugins, and I also changed a few things about it. Some folks really didn't like it, and I understand why. As it was implemented, it was poor design. The thing that makes a game a game is that there's something to figure out. A big part of a game's fun is trying to figure out what the best strategy to beat something is (the other part is executing that strategy). In the flu minigame, new characters were infected completely at random, which led to situations where you'd almost have it beat, then someone would get infected all the way across the building, and before you know it tons of people would be sick again. Because it was purely random, there were no strategies one could use to mitigate this, and thus it was more annoying than fun.

In my rewrite, I chose to address this problem by making the flu more localized in how it spreads. Generally speaking, the flu won't 'jump' incredibly far now. (I used a Gaussian, for you math types out there.) This may sound minor, but it is now possible to use strategy on it. I've played it a bunch now, and if you manage to get the flu confined to one area, you can usually get it cleaned up. There's still a small chance for it to jump pretty far, but in most cases it does not. I can't promise you'll find it fun now, but if you don't, I'm pretty sure you'll find it less annoying.

I also changed how the 'infected' sound plays; it's now an indicator of where the newly infected person is. If the person is a little to your right, the sound will be a little stronger on the right. If they're really far to your left, the sound will be entirely on the left, etc. Small thing, but it helps!

The last thing I did to the flu minigame was use preloading. 0.6.2 will be the first time I've used preloading in real release, and I'm interested to see what people think about it. I don't want to explain all the details, but basically the game might be laggy at strange times because it has to go look for files it needs on the hard drive, which takes time (particularly if you're using one that spins). Preloading helps fix that. During playtesting for 0.6, the flu minigame was giving me some strange lag on my (quite powerful) Windows machine when running it from the HDD. Preloading seems to have solved the issue for me; hopefully it'll do the same for you if you're having the same problem. Preloading can have some drawbacks, but the files are quite small, so hopefully no one will have any troubles.

The Mechanic I've Been Working On

I kinda wanted to save it as a surprise, but I guess there's no harm in talking about it - the mechanic I've been working on for the dungeon is bombs. I guess the biggest danger in discussing it is that I might get put on some automated FBI watch list, but one must sacrifice for one's art!

So yeah, bombs. I'd implemented them in a crude version of the boss fight quite a while back, but it was more of a 'duct tape and twine' implementation. Reusing the mechanic - in different rooms of the same dungeon, say - was a huge pain. The mechanic now uses plugins and is implemented in a general, flexible, reusable, and easily debuggable way. In fact, you might say it's a bit over-engineered, given that this isn't a game about bombs. But I wanted it to be good, okay? Anyway, let's talk a bit about 'em.

First, the bombs can hurt you. Some enemies throw 'em at you, and they kinda sting! But under some circumstances, you can use 'em too! What for? Well, first off you can destroy some obstacles with em:

You can also blast enemies with em...

Neat, right? But wait, there's more! Bombs can also set off other bombs!

I can do other stuff too. Bombs with asymmetric blast patterns, different delays, different damage radii for different difficulty modes, etc. You might think something like this would be included in the engine, but it isn't. It took a lot of my own code to implement.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with it. It's not earth-shattering or super-innovative, but it works fairly well, and I think you could do a lot of interesting stuff with it. 

In fact, that's my problem. The challenges I'd planned seem a bit pedestrian now, since I could clearly do more. I have a few ideas for how I'm going to spice things up, but I'll need some time to ruminate on it. In the meantime, I'm getting back to serious work on the writing!

Anyhow, I wanted to let you guys know how development was going. Do you have any interesting or fun ideas about how to use the bombs? Please let me know! And thank you for your support!