The Fool's Path | devlog 11

Let's see if I have done enough to fill a devlog.

I'm almost finished with level 11. The secret level. You can only access it from the menu. I think this is the best level I have made so far. It uses everything I have learned making the other 10 levels. You party starts separated with the knight and wizard locked in rooms. You need to use the archer to free the other two. The map is a big spiral of corridors with puzzles and traps everywhere. I wanted to use each of the biomes in this one level, but I might cut out the winter part because it's getting too big. I added an ice trap along with fireball traps. If the ice ball hits your unit, it's frozen until you drink a haste potion otherwise your dead. This level is quit a bit harder than the previous ones. Since it's optional I wanted to make it a challenge. 

I finally got the goblin sapper in the game. It's a goblin carrying an explosive barrel that blows himself up. I use it on level 11 in a big way. One section of the map is riddled with them, so you need to be ready with the shield button. I don't have the death animation for the goblin sapper so I made do with giving it a fuse sound effect that plays before he explodes himself. I also made a shower of sparks that comes out of the explosive barrel to look like a lit fuse. I made it so the sapper damages both player and enemy units so you could use it to your advantage. 

Level 11 was getting so big that I needed to add a checkpoint system to the game. It would be a pain to have to redo the whole level if you died to a goblin sapper near the end. It was easy enough to code. On death just move all units to the checkpoint position and restore health and mana. Right now the units just instantly move there. I think I need a fade to black and fade back in when the units are moved. I got some feedback and I think I am going to add checkpoints to earlier levels. Like the cemetery level would be a pain to have to do over if you die on the boss. It's hard to keep in mind someone playing the game for the first time, because I've played it so much.

I ran into trouble a couple days ago. Certain levels started slowing down to like 25 FPS. I went through all my code desperately searching for what the problem was. Finally I updated Godot to 4.2.2 and that solved all my problems. After I updated the game runs buttery smooth and I swear the load times got shorter. My guess is a windows update messed something up and it got fixed in the newest version of Godot.

I think the fog of war tiles are the major thing slowing down load times. I've never explained the FOW system I made in one of these devlogs because I made it before I started keeping a log. It was a journey let me tell you. There is no tutorial on how to do the kind of fog of war I wanted. Or at least I  couldn't find it. So I had to come up with my own thing. Since everything else in the game is made of tiles, I just made another tile called fog. A fog scene is spawned on top of every fog tile. The player unit has 4 rotating raycasts that acts as the units "vision". If one of these rays hits a fog scene, the fog goes invisible. It makes for a cool effect when entering a room the fog takes some time to clear which I like. It took like a week of trial and error to get it working, but I think it turned out pretty good.

I did another pass on the sound effects. I added a bunch of sounds that were missing. I added a better shield sound effect when you block an attack, a better dagger sound effect, ice projectile, ghost projectile, and many more. It actually adds a lot to the game. Since the animations for the attacks aren't all that great it can at least have cool sound effects. 

I guess the next thing that needs doing is new game plus. I thought about having the option to take less than 3 characters for the challenge, but I remembered some of the puzzles require three units to complete. I would also need to come up with another menu to control it. It seems more trouble than it's worth. So I'm just going to make new game plus harder in other ways. More hit points on enemies could be interesting. Along with more enemies in general.

After the secret level is done, and new game plus is done, and I've got it uploaded in working order. I think I'll take a break for a bit and then come back to it with fresh eyes. The last 7 months have been like a fever dream working on this every day. I should probably take a break from it for a while at least.