Day 137: Today I got even more paperwork to do. Let’s summarize a bit. This friday I have an appointment for a new passport. The light on the water heater is bad (but it still works for now). In early april I’m going to Paris for a localization sprint at Mozilla. In late April, I’m showcasing my game in Lyon. And for each thing, I have a lot of boring stuff to do. Sending emails, buying train tickets, talking to a lot of person to make it happen, etc…Sigh.
Daily interesting stuff:
Tasks done:
Implemented a way for the player to change the difficulty of the game. I took the easy way. I just added some key multipliers. It’s now possible to multiply the gold earned, the enemies life, bullet damage, and firespeed, as well as the player life. Making the “behind the scene” system was pretty easy. I just multiplied the existing variables by a float stored in PlayerPrefs. Easy. Well after that I thought it would be cool to be able to modify the difficulty in run time. So I had to add a “difficulty changed” event. That wasn’t so hard. I did all that yesterday. But I didn’t tested it enough so it still had some bugs. But the part that took me longer than I thought, was the UI. Making those multipliers easily accessible by the player took quite some time. First I had to modify the settings pane to add a button to open the difficulty pane (which didn’t existed at the time). It should be easy right, just add a button. Well it should. But it wasn’t. I had to move all the other element, and resize the pane. Then I remembered that the animations were dependent on the size. So I had to change the animations as well. Then I had to make the difficulty settings panel. Putting header and sliders an stuff like that. Then I had to actually make the sliders do something (save multiplier and trigger the changes). I spent some times trying to make some preset buttons. Stuff like “easy”, “medium”, and “hard”. But mixing that with custom setting of the multiplier was complicated and not so worthy. So I simply ditched the presets. Then I had to fix some bugs. A really funny one, was that since you could multiply the life of the enemies by 0, they would all die instantly. And that includes the bosses. So you would instantly win the game and be sent to the end “cut scene”. That was a bit weird. So I simply set the multiplier slider to be clamped between 0.01 and 2 (instead of 0 - 2).
Finally fixed the horrible UI control of the mini map. Wow that’s misleading. What I did was that I changed the way the map is showed when it’s in “big mode”. Instead of having the player pos indicated in the center and the rooms being offset, I show the rooms fixed. That way when you have the small minimap, it shows the rooms around you, and when you have the big map, it shows the dungeon in it’s entirety. Yes I know this was really poorly explained. But thanks to this clever trick, I don’t have to implement controls to move the map when in big mode! I think it’s more dynamic this way. You don’t have to actually stop to read the map.
Put a music in the intergame menu. I spent a bit of time looking for a free music that would fit the game and the other music. I’m not 100% sure, but if I were, I would be a sound designer. I think, it’s okay. I really need to code a fade in/out for the scene transitions though. I’ll do that tomorrow.
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