11/13/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome back to another development update for my game Hero Soul.

This week's focus was on polishing the forest level of the game. There were many small things that needed to be fixed such as sprite layering and misplaced colliders. Additionally, I began work on the cave level's modified rooms. Here are a few pictures:

Personally I think progress for this level is going well.

Additionally I worked on polishing up combat in the game. It was recently brought to me that the combat is lacking a sort of oompf and I fully agree. It took some fine tuning but I think combat now definitely feels more satisfying. For example when hitting enemies, the screen will shake. I did experiment with slowing down time but it turn out to be barely noticeable. Hit animations have also been enlarged to really show the impact of hitting something.

Moving on to next week, I want to push and finish the cave level's layouts as well as tune the enemies to better fit the new rooms. I also want to continue my work on companions making them smarter and improving pathfinding.

That's it for this week! I'll be back next week for another development update. 

11/6/18 Development Update

Hi everyone and welcome to another development update for my game Hero Soul. I've done quite a bit this week, let's get into it.

This week I focused almost entirely on the idea that, on a granular level, each room in every level can be the vessel of the procedural generated story. On that note, I work specifically on tuning up each room's layout to give the Koros Forest level more varied rooms and shape. So the first thing that has changed was fix of the "Super Blob" that plagued the old level generation code.

On the left is an old example of the level generation script. As you can see, rooms are always connected based on if they border other rooms. On paper, this seemed like a fine concept but in practice, many levels generated created cluster of rooms that were all interconnected, as seen on the left image above. This created a severe lack of definition and I feel was a detriment to the story when generated. So this led me to the fix above on the right. Now, rooms may border each other but do not have to be connected with one another. This created a more maze-like feel and removed the problem of the "Super Blob" cluster of rooms.

As a side effect of this new level generation script I also worked on making rooms feel more unique. Before I was limited in what I could do since every room layout had to accommodate the possibility of being connected on all sides. This led to very cookie cutter rooms of a uniform shape. With this new update I could now design unique rooms without having to worry about that.

Above is an image of one of the new rooms, in which there are around 30 now as of now. Hopefully these new layouts will create a more immersive feeling while in the level as well as making it easier to tell story using them. 

That's it for this week! I will continue to polish up these new rooms!