Kandria

The fight goes on

It's the last October update, fresh out in November! Next week will be a monthly update, where the third team member, Tim, will be introduced. He'll start working coming Thursday, so expect to see him announced on Twitter and show up on Discord around then.

Nick - Bugfixes and combat

I did more bugfixing this week, mostly related to deployment and MacOS. There were a bunch of fires to put out on Thursday and Friday, too, so those days ended up quite stressful for me. Unfortunately one of those fires still rages on – surround sound on Windows still most of the time, but not always, completely crashes the game in very unexpected ways. This only happens on Windows, with surround sound, and with the game running. Take any of that out, and the game runs fine. The error is also really hard to debug and find the cause of, so despite pouring hours into it already and consulting with others, the cause remains unclear. Still, surround sound setups are not uncommon, so this is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed.

Other than the bugfixing though I've integrated a first NPC and improved the dialogue interaction a bunch as a consequence. You can now talk to Fi and ask her about stuff you've found:

https://courier.tymoon.eu/api/courier/file/view?id=c8nc0AXoqRMXRBVQSDTPNw%3D%3D

This also prompted me to completely rewrite how quests were stored and organised for the game, expanding its capabilities and making it easier to manage by hand. I still want to write a quest editor, but until I get that done this should help a lot.

Finally I got to integrating Fred's new combat animations, and adding some very primitive testing enemies. There's now boxes to smash and a... uh. wiggly man-creature. There'll be better animations for this stuff in the future, I promise! I just had to get something down quick to test.

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Anyway, I'm glad that my hunch was right – having better animations already makes the combat a lot more fun. It's not great yet, though. There's still a lot left to do in tweaking the movement and interaction with the enemies, adding splash effects and sounds, all of that. It takes a lot to make a combat system fun!

Next week I'll work some more on tooling to make testing the combat easier (spawners and such). Then I'd also like to put together the beta tester programme, and perhaps even start working on the quest editor. Depending on how many fires pop up that might have to be delayed again, though.

Fred - Still animating

Having fun doing quick pass anims. Keeping the character with a more limited palette to doodle those is super fun and allows me to make bolder anims pretty fast! Gonna focus on air attack animations pretty soon.

https://filebox.tymoon.eu//file/TWpFd053PT0=

Roadmap to 0.0.4

I think I said I'd put together a roadmap again, so here it is:

  • Fix surround sound for real.
    This is an important roadblock, and I really need it fixed.

  • Initial combat including aerials.
    The combat won't be finely tuned, but it should give a good preview on what it's like ultimately.

  • New platforming challenge rooms.
    I really need to just hammer out a bunch of challenge rooms to start practising level design.

  • First dialogue and story by Tim
    He'll need a bit of time to settle in and get acquainted with the tooling, so this should be a good way to practise.

There's other minor things I would like to get to, but that's tho most important stuff. I think we should be able to get this done in November, so expect a new demo by the end of the month!

After that it's all down to more tooling, and starting on the real vertical slice, so there probably won't be any more updates until that's done.