The Fool's Path | devlog 6

Another devlog. I don't think I added as much as I did last time but it's good to write it down before I forget. 

I've starting working on the 7th level of the game. I think I'm getting better at it. I setup interesting encounters with enemies and sort of build the level around what happens in play testing. For world 7 I had the idea of making a puzzle that forces you to split up your units. There are floor switches that you need to place a unit on top of to hold a door open. I make the player split up the units right before they need to fight an evil wizard character. So this level is slightly more difficult. The game should get harder the deeper you get, but I'm not going for some ultra hard game. 

I added lava tiles to world 7. I found a lava texture and had chatgpt right me a shader that animates the texture to look like flowing lava. I'm still working on the look of it and tweaking shader parameters to get it to look good. Since the lava is made up of tiles it is hard to make it look good without repeating patterns. There is a river of lava that flows through the middle of world 7. There is a lava forge with an anvil where a boss evil wizard hangs out.  I want to add more types of bosses to the game. I was thinking I could make a lava monster. Like a lava version of the slime. 

I recently added a mimic character to the game. I was just looking at 3d models on sketchfab and came across a mimic model with all the animations I would need. I think a mimic perfectly fits this type of game. So I paid like 10 bucks for the model and got it in the game. It looks like a normal chest and won't react to you until you get within 1 tile of it. Then it switches to turn based mode and the mimic bites you. I made it really tanky and it's able to attack 2 times in a row so it gets past the knights shield ability. The first time you encounter the mimic isn't until level 3 and then again on level 6. I'm using it sparingly so the player will fall for it. The mimic drops either a mana potion or a health potion when killed. So you still get something for interacting with it. 

I think I partially solved one of the issues with the camera. When switching between characters if the character's camera was rotated differently it could be jarring. So I changed it so now if one character's camera rotates they all do. That way the camera isn't facing the opposite direction when you switch units. It means less button presses to rotate the camera which is a good thing. 

I also added keyboard short cuts for the attack buttons. press 1 for bow/fireball/shield, and press 2 for dagger/staff/sword. Depending on what character you have selected. I need a way to communicate this to the player. So I think I'm going to add a controls page to the menu. Almost everything else is taught to the player by tutorial text or NPCs in game. So maybe I should have a NPC that tells you the controls, or maybe I could add tooltips to the buttons, or maybe I should do all of these things. 

The load times in the editor are getting longer and longer the more stuff I add to the game. It takes a solid minute to load into level 7. I've tested it when it's exported as an exe and it loads super fast. Just in the editor it's slow as hell. I don't know if I would have had the patience to do this type of work when I was younger. I feel like some one with ADD would loose their shit trying to work on something like this. I think the trick is to be working on multiple things at once usually I'm drawing or something on the side.  

Next thing I'm going to do this weekend is get started on world 8. This level will be set in winter time. I already have the snow covered pine tree models. I just need to get them into the game. This means I need to make a snow tile. Maybe an ice tile. I will have to brain storm what sorts of things could be on the winter maps. Maybe a snow yeti enemy. Maybe an ice version of the evil wizard. He could shoot ice at you and freeze your units. These last 2 levels will be difficult and I should pull out all the stops. I'm thinking there will be 9 levels in total. 4 regular levels, 1 cemetery level, 2 island levels, and 2 winter levels.  

They game is playable up to level 6 right now. You can switch to level 7 through the menu but it's only half complete. 

https://jhyde.itch.io/thefoolspath