8 hours, scattered day with met targets. Suddenly I'm attending Indiecade tomorrow with a couple friends, should be a good time.
Today I created the player trail, a series of 6 transparent gameobjects that mimic the player's movement, each one behind the player by an addition frame. Each is smaller than that last in a way that approximates the game, and the transparency seems about right. Very hard to tell about transparency levels, I think just have to eyeball it. Color matches the player and the whole apparatus sits behind the player. In motion it looks very similar, but when the game is paused and incremented forward it stretches out because the interval between function calls lengthens. Hard figure out if it is perfect. Added fast projectiles to the player. The player now keeps track of what projectiles stored inside of it are fast. These projectiles are turned to the pallet's first color while in the player and when fired out of it. Picking up a fast projectile adds a completed projectile to the player. Picking up a projectile while charging modifies the next to be fired projectile not the currently charged projectile. Fast projectiles move at 37 tiles per second. Their trail matches their color. Side shots from charges also pick up these characteristics. Things broke, things fixed. More work on projectile tails, gradient and length. Slow seems real good right now, fast not so much. Particles next, its been since month 1 that I used them?
This marks the half way mark on this project. I have invested 95 hours (if my math is right) into this project so far. The second half will likely be a smaller hour count, but damn thats a lot of hours. I am on track for this to be my highest hour count project. Progress: I feel sightly behind my goal of getting gameplay and menu systems in perfectly. That said, I am impressed by my own performance thus far. This is already the most elegant of my projects (its not elegant, but for me it is). If I slapped a second player in here tomorrow, connected a few menus, I could release it and pretend it was a full project from 2 months ago. As always the project has revealed itself to be more complicated than I first expected, forcing me to use many new systems. I have done a better job of accounting for interactions, coding with those in mind in many places, saved me a ton of time. But I would be pleased at this point to get the menus looking right-ish and the game play looking largely spot on. Maybe I don't model the unlocking content and maybe I can't get all the maps in. The taunting system probably wont make it. Look, there's a ton of stuff in these menus, its not all gonna make it. But I am confident that this will be my best project yet.