Hey! It's you again! I'm so glad to see you in this new installment of your favourite Weekly Update blog! So I'm gonna cut this short: there's a bit of new stuff in, but it's mainly just polishing stuff and making the game look a whole lot better. 

So without any further ados, let's get right to it then!

Mall Upgrade

First, I just want to quickly say something about malls. I've decided to change their appearance a bit by adding some textures to the lower half of the mall.

With this, I'm really trying to ram in the Mall aesthetic. I think it does a nice job if you ask me.

Audio Mixing

Next up, something a bit more difficult to display, but I'll do my best! 

Previously most sounds were either too loud or too quiet. The audio really needed to be remixed. Now I'm happy to say that I've started working on it.

First, I decided to scrap the logarithmic volume roll-off curve built-in with Unity. Turns out that the engine deals with minimum and maximum hearing distances by simply hard-clamping the curve, meaning that the sound would just abruptly cut without any smoothing whatsoever.

I've also decided to add some amount of audio spread. This essentially means that the closer the player is from an audio source the more centred it seems. This means that we're avoiding a hard point of audio origin or left-speaker-to-right-speaker effect. (as mentioned here)

Finally, I've also edited the actual sounds in Audacity to normalized them and reduce their volume a bit. I've also changed the actual in-game volume of each audio source.

Overall, this means a better sounding game with a bit more balance. Keep in mind, though, that this process is iterative: it will probably get better later on.

Slowdowns

Next, it's the big cheese ?.

Basically, I've decided to cook up a time scale manager with which I can slow down time and even freeze up the game for a couple of frames.

While It was really easy to code it was also a blessing. By making it a singleton it really made it easy to just slow down time for a given amount of time.

With it, I can really give weight to some of the player's actions. For example, I freeze the screen a bit when the player kills an enemy, giving it a really heavy feel. Another example is when the player vanquishes a boss. The idea is that time slows down to highlight the accomplishment of destroying it. This mechanic is still being refined, though... If the slow down occurred at the wrong time then it can take away any heaviness I'm trying to evoke.

Secondly, I've also buffed the aiming ability of projectile-based weaponry. Now the player can trigger a kind of bullet time while aiming. Its length is defined by the player's agility, so if you want to look cool just get that stat up!

Here's a video showing bullet time in action:

Minor Updates

• I've added a new sound that plays whenever a consumable item get ejected
• I've polished the loot mechanic so that enemy loot spawns only when the corpse has disappeared.
• Edited the per-room loot mechanic so that the items now get ejected rather than just spawn.
  • Previously this was problematic as most consumable items would fall through the floor making them uncollectable.
• Fixed a bug where some reusable items wouldn't play their pickup sound.
• Fixed a bug where players with the "boxed" capacity would get boxed if they would get damaged by a hurting status (such as poisoned or burned)
• Fixed a bug where some bosses' ragdolls would get stretched out when defeated.
• Fixed a bug where the boss would drop normal loot on top of the actual end-level loot.
• Fixed a bug where the mouse would still move at the same speed regardless of the time scale.
• Made items on pedestals not solid to the player
• Fixed an oversight where sand would make the same noise as grass when step on it.
• Fixed a bug were enemies weapons would disappear if the enemy's origin room would be culled.
• Fixed a bug in some levels where chasm floors (invisible but present for AIs) would be at the same altitude as normal floors, making AI not able to take bridges, feeling as they would actually fall through a chasm.
• Added reverb effect on some of the newest rooms
• Added panning to steps sounds.
• Fixed some reflection probes not being rendered in some rooms
• Fixed an issue where grass would hover over the ground.

Next Week

So, after a bit of constructive criticism, someone pointed out to me that the game looks quite dull. No challenges whatsoever. They also said that even though most of my assets were pretty neat my normal rooms were quite barren and looked un-interesting (especially compared to my special rooms). 

This, of course, meant that I need to re-evaluate my priorities once again. This time I'm basically trying to spice things up by adding a bit more varied enemies. This, however, can take time to come up with (not to mention that there's also behaviour trees to set up, which in of itself can be quite daunting). 

However, that would not deter me at all. I'm currently working on a new hopping enemy that, even though might not give any challenge might give the game a bit of originality...

So, in other words, it's enemy time! Afterwards, it's relic time and then after this is your usual suspect. This effectively means that I will put special rooms on the back burner for a bit. That's about it!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read a bit of stuff on behaviour trees...