Weekly Update – January 8, 2022

The first week of the year is always busy work-wise and this year was no exception. Hence, progress was limited.

• Figuring out lighting. I started to get the hang of the Smart Lighting 2D Unity asset. I set up a light source from the player and tilemap lighting so that light collides with walls.

• General room map element. Not every room in the dungeon can be a prison cell, summoning chamber, armory, etc. Rooms that don’t become one of these special types are referred to as “general” rooms. These rooms contain a random mix of enemy, object, and reward map elements. Adding this feature to map generation really helped fill out the dungeon in terms of use of space, challenge, interesting combat, and rewards.
• Item rarity. Items already had a rarity attribute, but it wasn’t used. Item rarity values have been populated and rarity is now considered when placing random items.

Next week, I’ll keep working on the lighting and some miscellaneous gameplay improvements/features like reducing the player input required to shoot arrows and making the weapon hotbar functional.