Devlog 05 - A Long Time

With my core player actions in the game at this point, I decided to start on other systems that I'd neglected up until this point. Things like dialogue and inventory.

I started with the former, believing that getting more player interaction in place would make the game world more fun to run around in, and it honestly did. Within a day, I had a basic modifiable system set up that could allow you to interact with specific NPC's. 

There still needed polish, such as getting the letters to animate in and out as well as sound effects (I also had to decide whether to have the sound effects be like Undertale where it goes off every time a letter is written, or like Pokemon where it goes off every time a new line is written). Because I wanted to be able to modify text speed, I think I'll tackle it like Pokemon.

Because the system seems to work pretty fine for now, I want to move on and tackle it again later.

While working on this system, though, I also started browsing through Reddit, and gained a lot of inspiration that way. What happened as a result of that was 2 major realizations.

1) As far as core systems went, there wasn't a whole lot that I could think to add. However, what I already did have is only a fraction of a percent finished. Even excluding light polish like particle effects, my systems could still have heavy improvement. I didn't even really scratch the surface about the stuff I wanted to do with my dialogue system. There absolutely is stuff that I haven't thought about yet, though.

2) Related to that topic, my game seems to be mechanically up to similar levels to highly upvoted WIP's. What my game is missing right now is things like art polish, animations, post processing, shaders, and better graphics. Considering a huge part of my goal with this project is to create a very stylized game, that'll need to be addressed, but it also kind of lets me know that I'm not falling behind too much.

A lot of that is going to come later in the polish stages, but basically, I feel like a good amount of the appeal is going to come from these aspects, and on top of a solid foundation of mechanics, movement, combat, and story, has the potential to be an incredibly solid game.

I want the game to be very stylized, such as games like Nier; Automata and Persona games, but again, can't really get that until later stages of development.

In the meantime, though, I did some back-end stuff to get the enemies more performant, which worked very well. Enemies are much more modifiable, which I proved by adding a large tank enemy that did massive damage and had more health, but moved slower and took longer to attack.

It also didn't work. Probably because I was just copying one of my little enemies and scaling it up. Whatever happened, I can assure you the system works. I promise.

(Upon further inspection, I found out that I was determining if it could attack through the animator, based on the distance between the center of the enemy and the player. However, I'd scaled up my enemy so big that the distance between the center and my standing height was too big. Also, these parameters were linked across all enemies, so I couldn't just change one as I pleased. This also included the animation speed, which meant I couldn't make it attack slower without having everyone else attack slower)

(This could easily be fixed by just creating another animation set for this tank, but I'm lazy)

All of this leaves the question, though: What now?

I was considering adding an inventory system, but I don't think I have the technical know-how to create one the way I want to (not that I even really know what I want yet), and a shop system and currency is useless without one.

I decided to label it under "needs more research" and let it sit for a while.

On the side, I began work on bettering Yuni's design and animations. Her new design has some very blatant, as well as a couple more subtle, changes and tweaks, but she overall looks much cleaner and fits a more modern idea of what I'm looking for in her design. This design might not be final, but I want to get a solid idea of her look, and as I said, I'm creating a stylistic game at its heart, so this is actually important to get right.

Her idle animation took me a few hours to create, but felt significantly more dynamic than her old one. I'll likely need to go for another pass on the animation later, but I'm happy with it for now.

On the gameplay side, I added I-frames to Yuni's kit, which will in turn allow me to add environmental assets such as spikes to the world, but I don't know how I'll go about their implementation. That being said, the i-frames were still a very necessary addition.

I spent the next few days wondering about things I could do with the game. I could add shootable doors, similar to those in Metroid and Hollow Knight, and it would likely take little time to add, but I'd like to have a sort of universal asset for the doors first, rather than constantly adjusting the size of them, which brings me to my next idea: The game, or at least the development side of the game, needs a grid of some kind.

Unfortunately, Unity doesn't really provide an easy way of doing this, at least not for the way I want it to work (I'd have to use a tilemap system for this to work, but I'm unfortunately not designing my levels that way), so I'd have to create my own from scratch, and to put it simply, I don't need to do that right this moment either.

I could create an options menu for the game, but I don't really have enough "options" to do that. 

So, what do I do? Well, the answer to that came from an accident.

I was playing around with Yuni's parameters, specifically trying to make her fastfall feel a little more noticable. It was, at this time, kind of a useless system. There was no reason to do it. I'm not moving with precise timing like in Celeste, I'm not improving combo trees like in Smash Ultimate, and it felt like there was no place for it.

I'd been playing around with it through this entire build, but I noticed this time around that I'd accidently moved the decimal one place over when typing the value out. Curious, I decided to mess with it a little, and holy shit, it was fun as hell, and reminded me a lot of both the "Instadrop" spirit ability in Smash Ultimate and Hollow Knight's Desolate Dive. I took it a step further and increased the fall speed limit for the moment, but the base amount felt just as fun, if not better.

I'm now trying to think of how I can incorporate the shooting into this idea as well. Maybe a strong shot upwards that sends her hurtling into the ground?

As of this moment, it needs a lot more tweaking. It looks like a bug atm, but with some animation, effects, and polish, it'll fit right in.

Coincidentally, it also happens to fall pretty in-line aesthetically with what I want my game to feel like, and takes a little more from the Persona inspiration I've been looking for.

(Thinking about it a day after)

So, I've been playing around with it more, and I think I'm gonna keep it, but it won't be a fastfall movement. In fact, the fastfalling will probably be removed.

Rather, my idea is to merge this with the combat, where she'll shoot upwards and the recoil will send her rocketing down. This makes it feel a lot more natural and more centralizes the shooting.

At the same time, I added a landing animation, the first of many new player animations I wanted to implement. I also went and added an animation for her drawing her gun to smooth into the shooting (one that I could later reuse as an animation for putting away the gun as well)

Talking of the gun, I felt that her range was, to be frank, a bit broken (the way the code was working, she could shoot someone from across the map, a total of more than 150 units distance (for a point of reference, Yuni is about 1 unit wide), and so I capped the range that she could deal damage to a more reasonable value (still a lot, but far more fair). It might be a bit annoying, but it would've had to happen at some point.

With all that done and now a month and a half later, what are my thoughts?

For the timespan since the last build, I don't think I got a whole lot done with regards to implementation.

Rather, I think most of my progress came from tweaking parameters and gaining a more solid idea of what my game actually is, as well as beginning on future implementation of animation, which leads into my next point.

For the next build, I want to focus on getting her animations into the game and the mechanics that require them, in addition to adding more polish to the player and further some existing mechanics in the meantime. From there (i.e: likely the build after), I want to start designing levels, or at the very least have a single level "blocked out" just to see how well it works. I already have some ideas about the level design, but I want to save them for when I'm actually developing it and flesh them out more.