The Fool's Path | devlog 10

Progress report number 10.

I couldn't help my self. I starting working on another level. Level 11 will be a hidden level you can only access from the menu. I want to pull no punches on this level. Since it's optional I want to make it a challenge for people who beat the game and want something more. The plan is to have the party start in the middle of a big maze. Instead of starting on one side of the map and moving to the other. This time you will start in the middle and work your way out around a spiral of corridors. I want to add some fireball traps like on the first level. Maybe a ice ball trap that freezes you then releases enemies. I'm going to take my time with this map and work on it when I get bored of other things. 

I finished adding the 2 new mirror enemies to the game. The evil knight and evil archer. They are just enemy versions of the player units. The enemy knight has the same shield ability the player has and uses it after every attack. So you will need to break his shield before you can damage him. I think it's a cool addition that shows up late in the game. I haven't gave the enemy archer any special abilities yet. It just acts like a skeleton archer with more hit points. 

I redid the final battle of the game. You now need to fight all the mirror enemies in the game. The evil archer, knight, mage, and ice mage. Beating all these enemies at once is a pretty fun challenge it turns out, and it sort of makes sense as a final battle. I've played through it probably a dozen times, and it's always a tense battle. I added a few more secrets to the last level as well, just some hidden destructible walls that hides a haste potion. I added this haste potion a while back, it gives you plus 8 action points and will unfreeze you if your frozen by the ice mage.  It can come in handy in the final battle if you take the time to find the secrets. I never explain what the haste potion does, I just leave it to the player to drink it and find out. I also made the final boss ice wizard twice it's normal size to show it has a lot of hit points. It looks kind of silly but I like it. 

I just recently implemented a simple save feature. It now saves the last level you were on when you quit. This was a pain in the ass to get working. Godot had changed the way you save things since the last time I worked with it. ChatGPT jebaited me hard into using json to save a variable, but Godot now has it's own save feature that makes things way simpler. The logic for how the game saves and loads was hurting my brain but I think I have it all worked out now. So if you quit on level 5, the next time you start the game it will start on level 5. I still need to add a button to clear save data if you want to start fresh, or you can always pick whatever level you want from the menu. But this way you don't have to remember what level you were on when you come back to it. I could go one step further and make a proper save feature that would save the state of everything in the game. That's a ton of work and I don't think it's really necessary for this type of game IMO. 

I also started on the new game plus feature. When you beat level 10 the game starts over at level 1, but in NG+ mode. The levels will be like twice the difficulty of the regular game. I'm still working out what I want to add to each level, but since I have the save feature working  I can now save the fact that it's NG+ or not. The game is only about an hour long, and you can miss some things in your first play through. So running through it again on a high difficulty could be a fun addition. 

The game is getting so complicated that adding more features to it may just break everything if I'm not careful. A few times now I accidently broke something and had to spend the entire day chasing down what I did. It's a big balancing act, or a house of cards that could come tumbling down at any point. I want to hurry up and finish it before that happens. 

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