I’m inching closer to a completed demo. Time continues to be in short supply.
- Finished adding missing sound effects. Portals now hum and play a sound when the player walks through them. Some objects were missing sounds for some actions.
- Balancing. Play-tested levels 1 and 2. Level 1 feels appropriately difficult but level 2 is too easy, especially when the player finds better weapons and armor on level 1.
- Reduced map size from 64×64 to 56×56. I’m still trying to find the sweet spot where the map has enough room for a challenging main path and some optional areas but isn’t so large that it feels tedious to fully explore or doesn’t have enough variety.
- Bug fixes
- I wasted a few hours on an issue that I believed was in code but turned out to be in configuration. The issue was an error that consistently occurred during map generation. It didn’t cause map generation to fail, so I put off fixing it for a long time. I also ignored the issue because I was reluctant to dive back into the complicated history and map generation code. But, for the upcoming demo, I am clearing as many errors and exceptions as possible. After examining the map generation logs from multiple test runs, I realized that the problem was a single misconfigured Map Element (the objects that populate the map). That was painfully obvious in hindsight! Whenever I encounter an error caused by misconfiguration, I add a validator to the configuration editor and/or a log message to check the configuration. This helps me avoid red herrings in the future.
The remaining tasks for the demo are:
- Missing sound effects added (95% -> 100%)
- Major bugs fixed (75 -> 80%)
- Balancing: (50%->55%)
Next week, balancing and bug fixes for the demo are the priority.