Entry 24

Week 12 Worklog

The Finishing Touches

4/10/25

Once again working at polishing, admittedly this wasn't a super long work session compared to the past couple of days but it's progress nonetheless. Most notably, I got the infinite cloud scrolling working on the main menu! (I also added some post-process bloom)

 

 

I still feel like it's missing something.. maybe something behind the logo? But that's a later problem.

4/11/25 - ...like the 21st

So you'll never guess who lost track of time and hasn't been properly updating this. Though to be fair I do need to be more focused in on getting this done for the showcase that's... in 3 days from now. So I'm just gonna give a rundown of what I've been up to as this leg of the journey comes to a close.

 

NEW ANIMATIONS

In the realm of 2D, I added some new animations for Doc as well as FERRI. For Doc I decided to make a sort of "game over" sprite for them, for when they respawn on the subway after losing all their HP. The game is an infinite loop, but this is still technically a lose state I guess.

 

As for FERRI, I simply just made a cleaner talksprite for it, and have its speaker move to make it look like its talking.

Meanwhile in the realm of 3D, I decided to add some animations to the cannons on Press 'N Hold, both because I thought it'd give the stage a bit more life and more importantly, give the player some way to react to a cannon that's about to fire.

 I'm not sure if I mentioned it in prior entries, but I also finally added the second cannonball color variant and also decided to add a little "shake" animation to the HP bar when Doc gets hit.

PARTICLES, LIGHTING, AND POST-PROCESSING

As seen in the previous gif I've added lighting and post-processing to all of the stages so that's done. It doesn't look at crunchy in-game I promise haha. More important though is that I finally relearned the particle system and have those going in a few stages, namely the Subway and Aether (formerly known as cloudskipper, took me 12 weeks but it has an actual name now). 

 

I also want to talk about the subway's lighting and a detail that I know will get overlooked but I'm cheesed with the fact I figured it out so I want to share, and that's how I got the reflection in the windows working. It's such a small thing, but I'm so happy my scuffed cubemap worked because it really helps sell the environment more as opposed to not having it at all. Here's the map in question if you're curious:

 

Anyways, while the particles in the Subway are purely just decorative, I decided to add some light particles along the pathway in the Aether level to help guide players to the goal, as I realized that there are parts in that level that could confuse a new player as to where they need to go next.

 

OTHER BITS OF LAST-MINUTE POLISH!!!

Wasn't really sure how to categorize this one, but one final neat visual thing I decided to implement was this typewriter effect on FERRI's dialogue. For whatever reason though it doesn't work on the dialogue box opening, but to get past this I just decided to have FERRI make some harsh *KSHHH* sound since well. It is a subway PA system after all and we know how garbled they can be. It makes sense in my brain. 

 

SHOWCASE PREP!

Most of my other work as of late has been getting ready for the showcases, so that means compiling and getting prints of the art I've done for this project. I have a 6ft table to cover, and it can't just be polyfill clouds y'know?

 

For the things I am getting printed, I have the two pieces of concept art of the main levels as well as a few in-game screenshots, but the ones I'm most excited to display are the sheets I have for Doc's sprites and concept art.

 

I had fun putting those together :3

There's still some last-minute stuff I'm figuring out, mostly some sort of artists statement/explanation for the project as well as how the table is going to be organized in general (the most I have at the moment is a gaming setup and some poly-fill to look like clouds. What a setup). 

PLAYTESTING ADJUSTMENTS!

All this visual stuff aside, my remaining work has consisted of having my friends playtest (something that should've been done months ago but yeah sure lets wait until the last minute why not) and making small adjustments and changes to the game to make it easier to pick up and play for a first timer. 

The most notable thing was the fact that this entire time the mouse camera controls were inverted. While I didn't have trouble with this (probably because I'm so used to playing around with the janky controls haha), it wound up tripping up my friends when playing through the game for the first time. Thankfully my past self did current me a favor and the camera script already had a bool for inverted controls, so I just quickly added a toggle control to the player to swap between the camera controls (the "I" key).

 

Another thing I noticed while my friends were testing was their reluctantcy to double jump, which is something I did try to account for even beforehand with the platforming-heavy level, but there were still some spots where they had trouble so I've been making adjustments there.

 

The final big notable thing I decided to add was hotkeys to force load a specific level for showcase purposes. This wouldn't be in the game if I were to make this into a full game (though maybe I could have some system where you can pick a level to travel to if you meet some type of parameter... that's a future idea though), but because the level selection is randomized AND because there's only two levels, there's a chance someone can get the same level like 5 times in a row. This happened while testing. So! I have two hotkeys on the number pad to put the player into a specific level so all of my work can be seen at the showcase.

Conclusion...

It's been quite the ride these past couple of months, lots of ups and downs and lots of things I learned both about gamedev and myself. I'll do a more in-depth postmortem in the next entry (likely after the showcase, potentially after graduation we'll see) but all that I can say for now is that I want to sleep.

(hi future lex here, excuse the fact that this is being released late instead of on the 21st like I meant to its been busy. I forgot to hit the publish button 💀)