Tonight, the biggest notable change is the addition of the first music track! It's a pretty happy 8-bit-esque tune, made by not very simple means, but entirely as procedural content. I played with some random seeds for about an hour on http://www.abundant-music.com/ until I had a tune that was upbeat and felt nice on my timpanum. After another few hours of tweaking, I decided to call it final. The name of the track is "Grocery", as it's intended to use in a grocery shopping scene, where the objective is to purchase a handful of items (all while avoiding the girls, of course!)
The other thing you might notice is a new set of "nervousness" effects. I'm not happy with it, yet. But you'll see the screen shake as you run out of attention, and the shaking gets more violent as you get nearer to the threshold of failure! The character controls will also reverse on you, making it even more disorienting. With these effects in place, I think the attention meter actually drains too fast, now. That just means more tweaking for later!
I'm still waiting on additional artwork, but there is still a lot I can do in the meantime:
- Errands.
- Better AI.
- Sound effects.
- More music.
- More girl sprites with different AoE radii.
- More varied backgrounds and a better starting map.
- More maps.
- Title screen.
- Game Over screen.
- Ending.
- Transition screens (explaining the objective for the map).
- Anything else we want, if there is enough time...
I put errands at the top as a means to remind myself that it's going to be my highest priority for tomorrow's update. I believe it won't be much trouble to include the errands list in a map property, which just references objects by name. For example, the grocery store map will have errands to collect milk, bread, vegetables, etc. And there will also be a collectable item named "milk", and another named "bread", etc.
The errands UI could get fancy. I'm planning to draw a sheet of notebook paper that will be Tweened onto the screen at the start of the stage, listing all of the items for the errand. Then the paper will be Tweened into a corner, but the font will remain original size (so it's directly readable). Depending on difficulty level, it could also disappear completely after you've seen it once.
Another idea is to have the kid start out with limited monies, and allow the player to purchase items that are not on the list (oops!) Then it becomes a game of skill, balancing your attention level, errands list, and available resources! But it's just an idea ... I don't want to start breaking scope. ;)
See you tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment