Devlog No.040

Still just working through Kirizimi Cove, the next area. I've finished up quite a lot of the town. One thing I am worried about the town segments is that they might feel a bit empty due to how big each room is and the fact there aren't any enemies or candy in most of the areas. But then again, maybe it will feel nice to not have to rush anywhere. It could be that I'm experiencing some kind of soft burn out. I say this because I'm looking at a couple of the new areas and feeling like they're uninspired even though it's just how towns can look. Rows of similar buildings.

I'd like to come back at some point and edit the buildings a little just to make them at least have a new coat of paint and identify them as being in a different town. I did refit a couple of buildings and will have some new signs to hang outside of some shops. There are a few new tiles here and there, and I've made some pots that I can easily put plants in (And modified some of the flora to fit into the pots) so interiors can look nicer in general. Though the outside is what I am most concerned about.

I finished up the mine area and now it just needs a few enemies. Due to the random spawn chance of gems, I figure for this mine area I will also add a few enemies which have semi-random spawns just to make subsequent visits slightly different. Not like full on procedural generation though or anything. I will also say I only intend to force you to visit the mine area one time as there is a guaranteed spawn of a single Zerkawn near the end every time you go. But you can revisit it as much as you like and there will definitely be reason to do so. But you really don't have to if you don't want. I plan to add at least two more mine areas later in the game. The second one with a decent amount of gems with slightly more dangerous enemy spawns and the a final one which will be dangerous to keep revisiting, but have a lot of gem spawns.

Here's a wide shot of the mine area:



No enemies added yet, but that won't take long. I'm thinking I will add a really simple bat enemy and a few gobbos.

And here is a little closer shot:



You can see the 'gem nodes' and these are really just potential spawn points. I have the most dense amount in the middle there configured manually, but most just follow the default 20% chance to spawn. Though due to the way the dirt is set up, certain weapons actually can't reach those two potential nodes on the bottom there. Charge cards for example don't have a way to do so. Neither does the blaster weapon. I'm ok with charge cards not having a way to reach them, but I think I may add an upgrade for the blaster which increases the dirt clearing AOE range making it taller and wider by 1 block.

I do worry about making this kind of upgrade though because it does mean I have to limit level design. If, for example, there is a level I make which has a ledge made of dirt and an enemy on the dirt, then this would cause the player to destroy the ledge when trying to defeat the enemy for example. And not everyone may want that. I could also just enforce it and make it baseline, but I don't want that exactly. Though I could also make it toggle-able in some way, but that's also more work. I could also make the upgrade have the AOE radius on the explosion significantly increased and then add another upgrade that lets you detonate the blast early, but that still kind of limits level design a little is all.

Well maybe not limiting level design exactly. More like makes the weapon less desirable for some areas potentially. Just things to think about is all.

Moving on though, here's some shots of what the town looks like. They're not the best since the parrallax doesn't function when I just take screenshots in the room editor, but I figure better to just show how things are coming along. This isn't everything of course, but should just give some idea of how it's coming along.

Dock area:



The boat arrives from the left and stops. I want to add another boat here and also add a bit more detail. Something that may not be obvious, or maybe it is, is that there are tiles placed on a layer which represent that blue/black gradient and they get a little bit in the way due to the layer I have to place them on. The amount of required layers and how many I have had to retroactively add kills me since I started with so few and just slowly keep adding more to keep adding complexity to the environments and it never seems like I add enough! (But more layers is good and I haven't found any info online that suggests Game Maker performance is affected by adding more. I may just break down and spend an evening adding a bunch more layers to all the rooms in the game currently, but that would just be very tedious work. I really should've just seen this coming after I made the forest area and had to add a bunch even back then!)

Wide shot of the area near the mine entrance:



Just something I want to say about the entrance to the mine but I realized I had NPCs that spawn and also updated the NPC code so now they sort of 'scan' the elevation to spawn. The non-chat npcs that walk around also have better code so they can walk up and down platforms and stairs too.

Blacksmith building close up:



There will be a blacksmith NPC girl here, though I am not 100% on how I will implement her function. Whether she will just offer the player all currently found weapons at a jacked up price or something more significant, I don't know until I actually get around to programming her.

Town center:


There's a shop here, a gatehouse sort of overhang into the background, the Inn, and an entrance into the foreground between the yellow and red tree on the right. The exit of the town is just off screen to the right.

Park area:



This shot doesn't look great due to how the town background looks, but that darkened parrallax in the sky is actually ground level in game because of a parrallax handler.

With that said, I may actually just add a stone or dirt background here since I am thinking that I will have a 'shrine on a hill' area that you can go to. This will be one of the few shrines in the game that you will have to do almost nothing to unlock. (Aside from pay the goddess symbols toll) If the shrine isn't on the hill here, it will be past the gatehouse in the previous picture.

The blue floating half gem here is a kind of 'peace' emitter. I'll come back to it later, but this is what prevents your energy from draining. (In Aria's lore) It'll also be the subject of why you can't leave. It's actually animated and spins slowly. I'm not happy with how the 'base' looks and might change it. I think it just looks bad. Also don't stare at the animation too long since it makes the claws look like they bend all weird-like.

I don't know why I made the 'docked' sprite of it since I don't have a plan to make it do so. I guess just to make sense of it since I did so before animating it. Also the top and bottom segment are separate in the game. I will likely make the top hover up and down just slightly too, but right now it's just in the game as an asset which has no code.

As far as getting the energy drain to stop, that is done. Fairly easy to get working thanks to earlier efforts to centralized damage sources. Also made it so you cannot die of poison in these 'peace' zones. Instead you'll just be drained as close as possible to 0. So you'll be able to run back to a shop to get healed. I think it will be fun and help to make the poison a little more threatening by making it so you don't have a guaranteed chance of finding candy since these new areas will barely have any.

On that subject, I am thinking I will make it so that your power level is forced to 0 while under the effects of the peace gem. I'll try it out in testing first to see how the gameplay actually is. Some of the level 0 upgrades should feel a little more worthwhile as a result and since you don't lose energy, you also don't have to worry about the time it takes to beat enemies. Though to be completely honest, I am mostly motivated to do this because if you perish, you lose all your power. By doing this, perishing will make it so you're sort of unaffected by it. Until I test it though, the 'fun' level of it is still up in the air.

I'm not sure how much it will be liked though so it's definitely something I'll need feedback on. Dying during normal gameplay is usually remedied by having symbols pretty freely sprinkled about, but if I do that in the town, the player can just go in and out of areas to have the symbols refresh and get infinite symbols basically. I don't really want that as it removes all challenge from building up your power.

East Side:

A raised area near the beach. It's not visible here, but in the bottom of that little cave area leads out to...

Seaside:


Something I've debated a lot with myself in these town sections is 'how to angle things'. Like the background I mean. What should I show exactly? For the park area, technically Aria turns 'to her right' and heads 'east'. (By default Aria is heading north throughout the whole game btw) When she turns right, the background can either show 'south' or 'north'. (I chose to show north) But what about while she's facing north? Then I should show 'west' right? That's how I have always been showing the background.

But I've been debating having it so sometimes you turn into an area and 'go west' and then the background would show 'south'. Thinking about it on a 3D plane might be really confusing especially if you go into the background and suddenly you are going 'right to left' instead of 'left to right', but in order for it to make sense, if I show 'to the north' whenever the player is going into the background, they would have to go 'right to left'. But if I always just go 'left to right' then you will see 'south'.

Really I am likely just overthinking it and I doubt anyone will notice. Maybe I will intentionally just have some areas that go from right to left just to mix things up though. It might help with the way the player feels if I do so. Going into the background, you go from 'right to left', but going into the foreground the player goes 'left to right'. (The thing that made me think of this most is actually when you are in the Inn at the start of the game. It has windows... but if you look at how the inn actually looks, the windows don't make sense where they are positioned. But I don't think anyone cares. Maybe I will change the position of the exit on that inn lmao)


And Kirizimi I might actually change the position of it's door too since I feel like I should add windows to it. The design of Kirizimi's internal looks much more fitting to the actual shape of the inn too. I think I might go do that now actually. (And come up with a name for the inn)

I think that's all to really talk about just this instant. I am still just working away steadily. Making rooms doesn't seem at all hard to do even when I am doing it, but then I realize several hours later that I messed something up and come back over and over again. The bridge in the park area I put on the BG layer for example. Just small mess ups that consume time.

I also have a shop music track being made and I'll upload that when it's done too.

But yep, that's it for now! I'll likely stop working on Kirizimi to start on our pearl diver too. I also have a buncha NPCs to design too so there's quite a lot left to do surprisingly.