Hello again folks,

A second week of development for this game has passed and it is ever so closer to completion. I got a decent amount of work done. Not quite as much as I had hoped for reasons I will get into, but it was a solid week nonetheless. The big new things are that the player character now has all their sounds and that the second phase has been partially implemented. 

For the sound effects I used ChipTone by Tom Vian. It’s a handy little audio tool meant to make retro-style sound effects quickly. It’s very easy when working with audio to get super in the weeds about everything I didn’t want that to happen, so ChipTone is the perfect tool. I still spent a while tweaking sounds to get them exactly right and I am mostly happy with how they are now. My absolute favorite is the sound that plays when you land on the ground. It’s quiet and very subtle, but adds a certain sense of space. I had considered adding footstep sounds for a similar reason, but I think they would be completely drowned out by any future music.

A lot of the work I did was preparing to build Phase 2. That meant getting Phase 1 to a place that I felt was in a sort of goldilocks zone in terms of challenge and building the transition from one phase to the next. I did this by “cheating” a bit and making each phase its own separate room asset. This allows me to easily edit the layout of the arenas in the built in editor rather than having to do everything programmatically. It, honestly, just saves so much time and is so much easier that I was a fool to originally plan to do it the other way. 

I had to come up with a way to do a little cutscene of sorts. It’s nothing too complex and GMS2.3 added a feature called Sequences that makes part of it fairly simple. They save me from having to do everything via programming and I already use them for the temporary (fingers crossed) victory and game over screens. Of course, as with everything when making a game, it was paradoxically simpler and more complicated than expected. The end result is a simple looking white fade in and out effect. I wanted it to be quick without being a flash since some folks are extra sensitive to sudden white flashes. I will still need to run it by someone like that though and then adjust if needed. 

As I said, I wasn’t quite as productive as I had expected this week. Around Wednesday my right arm started to hurt a whole lot, likely due to a repetitive stress injury of just sitting at the computer all day. I tried to rest up and get what I could done, but it was still in bad shade by Thursday evening. Eventually I forced myself to take a complete computer break, took some tylenol, and put an ice pack on my shoulder and elbow, then tried my best to stay away from my desk for at least 12 hours. That worked well enough but it’s still a little sore. I should probably get up and walk around a bit more than I do. Ah well. The other reason is perhaps a bit silly, but I was just watching a lot of the E3 coverage and found it difficult to listen and work at the same time since it’s live. 

My goals for this week are hopefully not too ambitious. I want to get Phase 2 finished, get some basic title screen and other menus implemented so that people get rebind controls/etc, and finally look into getting the color cycle effect on the tile layers so I can get a more finalized look for the art style. I think that’s a good list of goals. I’d like to get in some more audio and maybe actually write some dang music for this game, but I know that will take time. 

Lastly, the deadline for submissions to the Seattle Indies Expo is coming up on June 22nd. I think I will submit TOWS to it. I used to be quite active with the group years ago, but fell away from it for a number of personal reasons I’m not going to get into now. There were a few years where I regularly volunteered for their live events and the last time I really went I showcased Void Wisp there. That didn’t really translate into game sales or press, but I did meet and connect with some cool people. 

That’s all for now. Please check out the newest version and let me know what you think. Remember the plan for this game is that it’ll be free until its 1.0 release. The plan is for that to be the 27th of June. I will likely do some post-release support of some sort beyond bug fixes, but no promises and we’ll see. 

Thank you and I hope you all are doing good.