The Fool's Path | devlog 12

Still at it. 

I've just about finished the new game plus feature. Once you've finished the game, it starts over at level 1 with NG+ enabled. There are a lot more enemy encounters, and enemies have 20 percent more hit points.  After play testing it a bunch I think I like it way more than the normal mode, It's way more action packed, but for a new player it would be a little too difficult I think. I would like to add an option to turn on NG+ from the menu. So if your a badass you can turn on hard mode from the start. I thought about a NG++ where it wraps around again, and I could make it even harder. I could also turn off checkpoints on harder difficulties. 

I've finished the secret level. It's like twice as long as the other levels and uses almost all of the tile types. Dungeon, forest, island. I wanted to add a winter part to the map but it was getting to long, and it wouldn't make sense to have a winter part next to a tropical island part. If I care about it being realistic. I added an ice trap to this level that could easily kill you the first time playing it, but I put it right at the beginning. The trick is to press the button, get out of the way of the first projectile, wait for another projectile to pass then go. I also give the player a haste potion right before the trap so if you get frozen you can quickly drink a haste potion and get out of it. There are a lot of parts in this level that aren't exactly fair, but it's more fun this way. 

I've sort of stopped adding new features and started refining what I have and fixing long standing bugs. There was a bug where if you rotated the top down camera the controls for moving the camera around would get reversed. This seems like an easy fix, but to remap the controls to a different rotation required a bunch of trigonometry with cos and sin and stuff. Luckily chatGPT helped me out there.  I only left rotating the top down camera in the game for getting better screen shots and was going to just not allow it in the final game, but now that I got it working I can leave it in the game. 

There was also a bug with my checkpoint system. When a player unit dies in battle, the party gets moved to the last checkpoint. The enemy units need to all loose their targets and the game needs to leave turn based mode. This was a nightmare to code because things need to happen in a very specific order. Setting things up to test it took like 5 minutes each time, so it took literally all day. In the end I think I got it working for every conceivable way a player could die. The game doesn't reset when a unit dies, the units just get moved and the enemies still have the same amount of HP, so if there is a hard part you can just chip away at it, except for the last level where there is no checkpoint. 

Another bug I think I solved was the box and barrel movement code. Moving around boxes could get wonky if you got close to another unit or another box. The box could hover in mid air, and you would have to exit and enter it's interaction area to fix it.  I just added a variable to the box and barrel called carried. So if carried is true, it can't be picked up by another unit. This seems to have solved most of the problems with it. Moving around boxes is half of what the game is about so it needs to work perfect every time. 

The game was meant to have traversable tiles of different heights. Right now only the first level has an upper floor and you don't fight enemies there. The problem is the flood fill algorithm for showing traversable tiles stutters when it needs to check 4 more tiles at higher or lower elevation. If I could somehow run this flood fill function in another thread, it wouldn't cause the game to stutter, but I can't figure it out. So this long standing bug still persists. 

Now that I'm done adding features for the time being, I can work on the look of the game more. I think I want to do another pass on all the particles in the game. The blood particles took me like 10 minutes to setup and I didn't really put in time to make it cool. Same with the slime particles and explosion. These are things that can easily be improved. I want to go on another hunt for sky boxes. The night time sky box is ok, but the blue sky could be better. Maybe I should just pay some money for exactly what I want. I'm a little scared to start trying different wall and floor tiles, but they too could easily be improved. I guess I am still on the hunt for good unit models as well. The models I have were always meant to be place holder, so I should not be afraid to swap in something new if it's better. 

I uploaded a new version of the game that has all the bug fixes and everything. It will probably stay in this state for a while. I am going to take a slight break, and just take my time working on the look of the game. 

jhyde927@gmail.com

https://x.com/J_Hyde_