Polish, polish, and more polish

I’m running out of things to write about! Since we’re getting closer and closer to final, there are no “huge new features” that can be written about, and most of the work I currently do is polish behind the scenes, which doesn’t really make for good writing material. However, there are some things that make for good screenshot material, so I guess I’ll combine some artifacts into one post.

Firstly, as a followup to last week’s post, we have implemented some additional feedback when the player takes damage, as well as a brief invulnerability period after taking damage, like so:

This is actually a quite welcome change, even for myself. Looking back, I now realize how stupidly hard it was to notice you got hit. The “fluid” in the health bar would sink slightly, and the text below it would say “ / ”. That was it.

I’m still not sure this is enough though. Taking damage is quite a big thing in our game, since there’s no good way to regen health, so noticing is quite important. We have discussed some possible solutions, like making the edges of the screen glow red when you get hit, though I’m not quite sure of how I would actually implement that.

So what else did I do? Well, I added a tooltip on the textiles in the customization menu. During the last playtest, we realized that most people didn’t see the text below everything that stated what the currently active textile (the one you’re trying to equip) actually gave. So I implemented tooltips:

The tooltip follows the mouse around. Couldn’t make a good quality gif out of it, sorry!

As I’m writing this, I realize that I should probably move the tooltip to the left side of the mouse instead. But then it might end up going outside the screen. Eh, whatever. You can just move the cursor from the textile slots if you want to see what’s under it.

The last thing I’ve been working on this week is the last set bonus, the piercing shots. In essence, we want each projectile to have a list of enemies that it can hit, so it can’t hit each enemy several times. Tomas had done some of the work earlier, but gave it over to me. I, stubborn as I am, decided not to use that, and tried doing it my own way. This involved fetching the current list of active enemies, and adding it to each projectile on creation. This worked quite nicely, until you shoot two projectiles, and one of them kills an enemy. The second projectile then tries to access that enemy (which was deleted), and the game crashes. Not entirely sure how to work around that.

Also, I’m well aware that this post is about more than one artifact. Since each polish-artifact is so incredibly small, I didn’t feel like just one provided enough content for a post.