User Interface and Polish - Devlog 5

Timer

Alright, to kick it off with, the main thing of note is we have a timer! We still need to implement an end of game objective, but once that’s done, we can set up a high score thing in the menu that should be in the game soon.

This is the only real user interface thing I have to show off, since I’m not planning on adding a health mechanic or any expendable resources. Hopefully the menu is as easy to pull off as the timer.

Some visual polish

Also visible in the above gif is the removal of point filtering in the spritesheets I’m using. This has resulted in a more pixelated look to the game, and more importantly, removing the blur to the character and making the sprites of the terrain pop a bit more, and making the game look much better.

Now, some bug squashing

This has been the big thing that I’ve done this week. We’ve got enemies respawning properly, which is all well and good, but there was another issue with them that I encountered.

This was pretty problematic. Not only would it send the enemies away from the player when those enemies were activated, it also had the tendency to warp them out of the map. A change in their movement script stopped this from happening, and now they behave normally.

The spear. This flipping was something that’s been bothering me for a while, and I’ve fixed it by stopping the spear from spinning around left/right once it’s in the air. It’s kind of a band-aid solution, as I would’ve like to have the spear arc downwards as it was flying, but hopefully I’ll be able to do that in code at some point.

Speaking of the spear, for a while, it wasn’t deleting itself when the player died. This has been fixed and will be in the next build that should go up to Itch.io. There’s still the unfortunate circumstance of hitting both the wood and wall at the same time, activating the swing but deleting the spear, which I’m unsure of how to fix.

Torches

We’ve got animated torches going! Gonna make a crack at getting lighting into the game, as I feel like that could add a bit more to the aesthetic of the game.

Feedback

Enemy placement is good, but they need to be more visually distinguished as enemies, first impressions is that they are a collectible or checkpoint or something

This was a good thing to find out! I’ll work on making them look a bit more apparent to be enemies, since that is pretty important.

perhaps have some UI elements to show when a checkpoint has been passed, just to confirm to the player that the doors are in fact the checkpoints.

This is a good idea that I’ll (at least try to) implement! Since there’s already a script that updates the player’s respawn point when they pass through the doors, it might be as simple as tying something to that.