I’ve been at work for the past week and a half or so, and while being underway is always an unpleasant experience, there were a couple mitigating factors:
1) I made a bunch of progress on the game
2) It was my last underway, my last steaming watch, and my last shore-power-hookup
That’s right ladies and gents, in less than 4 weeks my terminal leave will kick in, and I’ll be a free man once more.
Which should give me lots of time to continue working on my game.
I used my time at work to polish off a couple issues, troubleshoot some problems with the dialogue boxes, and finish up the behavior for the final boss. Procedurally, the first level is complete. I still want to go back and tweak the design, and there are still three more tiny bugs I want to chase down. In the meantime, feel free to play through. I want some feedback!
Also, to make it easier to playtest, I left in some debug features:
The numbers 1 through 4 on the keyboard will load the first through fourth checkpoints, so if you want to fight the boss, you don’t have to play through the entire level to get there.
The number 5 will actually warp you right to the boss chamber, though it won’t work correctly if you haven’t loaded the fourth checkpoint first.
Hitting “G” will turn on god mode. You won’t notice any visual difference, but the player now takes no damage, and instead deals 1000 damage with every attack. When fighting the final boss, it no longer takes four tosses into the fire to burn the armor off.
And to recap (since I don’t have the “controls” menu working yet”) Q and E will swap weapons, F will use health drinks, and the space bar will advance dialogue (it used to be clicking with the mouse, but I changed it). Movement is WASD or the arrow keys. Left click with the mouse to attack, and right click to cycle weapons. (I’m considering taking the Q and E out; let me know what you think).
Also, about the first phase of the boss fight, it isn’t very obvious the way it’s animated now, so I added an energy bar below the boss’s health bar to show the state of his armor. In the final version, his sprite will change to show him wearing less and less armor as you burn it off. I may or may not leave the armor bar up there; I haven’t decided.
One thing I have decided on is the name of the game: Waking Dream. You’ll notice that I now have a domain name (godaddy was running a special, and I also had a coupon that knocked off another good chunk of the price). For now, the domain redirects to the blogspot, but hopefully I’ll have a more legit webpage to put up sometime after the new year.
It feels so good to see everything coming together. This has been a long time coming.
