This month was a mix of several items, culminating in me finishing the entire build backlog to give some close people a “demo” (pre-pre-alpha) to try out.
I tackled several bugs at the beginning of the sprint, including resetting the character back to idle during a dialog and fixing some labels that weren’t showing at the correct times.
I updated some remaining items from my move to 4.3, including switching to global groups. I also adjusted my logic for the pickup mechanic, as initially, I was trying to set the visual asset dynamically. Still, I realized quickly that I was making too much mess on the backend and switched to each asset being its own scene.
I also added some very needed collisions, like if you fall through a gap in the tiles, you will be transported back to the last marker location. I added a wall at the front of the level so you don’t wander off to nowhere.
I added fullscreen functionality and made the escape key work to get you out of it.
Once all those changes were complete, I returned to the art side. A significant accomplishment of this sprint was getting my character, instead of a stub character, entirely into the game. So now all of the animations are of my character; while they are not done, they are in a good enough state that you can clearly understand the visuals and the goal. While working through these updates on the animations, I also noticed that my abilities in this area were improving, so much so that I made updates even from the last sprint.
Regarding assets, the sky and water/ocean were adjusted and fit much better with the asethic I am going for; in case you are wondering I am calling the asethic somewhere along Bluey meets Ghibli. The backgrounds will be more watercolor/impressionistic. At the same time, the character and any interactable will be cel-shaded (this was a new term to me this month and means a hard shadow rather than a blended one).
Overall, the game is getting close to having a few people pre-alpha test level 1 to ensure this is going in the right direction. Of course, as I mentioned before the goal of this game isn’t to make money, but rather teach me what I need to know to make a game from start to launch (and post-launch), so that I can make my bigger second game that I have been stewing on for a while.