potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

 I've mainly been ironing out weird bugs on the boss fight. However, I feel a bit stuck on it, so I'm going to start working on level 2 since I already have a bunch of ideas for that including the overall design and a puzzle.

 I spent a little too long working on a shader for the hurtbox of the villi. But I'm going to put that aside for now and try to work on other stuff. I'm modifying the subway assets a bit because I want the player to beable to see through walls whichever angle they choose. I created a set of animations for the villi, so it's got all the attack/flinch, etc animations because the previous one was on a very prototype model. There's still some weirdness in the IK animation and I have to fix that.

 I have been working on the model for the new enemy. I also ran into a new issue. Some friends tried playtesting ALAWT on their old mac laptops. It crashed a whole bunch of times, so I am working on a compatibility version using the OpenGL renderer. Luckily, I think it's mainly just a few lighting tweaks and I ended up removing shadows on it. I figured if someone's laptop doesn't even support Vulkan, it'll probably struggle with shadows.  I'm going to update with a compatibility version/low end version soon. I noticed just removing shadows made it run at nearly 60fps on my budget laptop full screen, so it should be good for lower end devices as well, though I will eventually make that an option in the Vulkan version as well. It's also really hard to notice the missing shadows simply because the maps are already filled with fog and darkness. It's moving along I would say this monster is based off The Thing, which is one of my favorite movies. I felt like I ha...

 Added a new skill for Sera, a shield that gives invincibility for both her and Lea. However, the shield saps her health over time and Sera cannot move during shielding. However, Lea is allowed. This skill will basically be required during the boss fight. I also refactored the pathfinding (again) and changed it to a more reliable way. The code is also a thousand times more readable because I fixed some encapsulation issues. In addition, there is more control over Sera's dashes now because of the refactoring. if you select a location behind an enemy that Sera needs to get to, she will dash. Using this method, you can make her dash back and forth all day. Dashes do less damage though, so it's really for repositioning purposes. But you can also group up enemies using this technique. However, I also fixed an issue where the enemies used to just target one character (Lea). This allowed Sera to body block them and they had no idea how to deal with that. They do not do that now, they ...

 Refactoring character controllers 100% complete. All the player specific code is now part of a module that the controller can optionally utilize, which will make the co-op implementation (theoretically) simple to implement. The movement effects will also be easier to add. Here's the prototype sketch for the enemies for the "boss fight". They are named Villi for a reason. Sera's pathfinding has been improved. There was a bug where she would sometimes get stuck on a corner when dashing, that no longer happens, she will automatically reposition. The pathfinding was simplified, is more readable and works better, which makes me happy. Just fixing weird bugs related to the boss fight now, but expect an actual model of the Villi soon.

Unfortunately no new pretty things to look at. The boss fight code is about 80% finished, just have one more thing I wanted to add: a new skill for Sera that players should be making use of during the fight. Still have pretty much all of the art assets to texture and still need to design the look of the new enemy. However, before that I am refactoring the entire nearly five year old character controller code. The reason is because I have some weapons that will be able to affect the controller's movement as well as other things. The current code is basically way too much stuffed into the controller and too many things are doing the same thing, the product of someone(me) who could implement certain features but not in a robust or modular way. So now I'm refactoring things so that everything is not only more simplified but more modularized and less buggy. This had to be done for a while, but I had put it off until I realized that I was just adding to more technical debt. This refa...