Happy Fourth of July for any state-side readers!
Progress on Why Am I Dead II could be fairly characterized as slow but steady. After giving up the ghost (ha) on the Indiecade deadline, I have to find something else to latch onto so that I can push myself harder.
But that’s not to say that I’ve slacked off! I decided to take a break from art and return to programming. Much like how pulling a thread can unravel an entire garment, a small change to how I displayed things on screen turned into a pretty thorough upheaval of the whole game engine. It was a long time coming, since a lot of the original code was 1) written a year ago and 2) written with a much smaller project in mind.
The benefit of all that work is invisible, but present. The code is just overall a lot better and less stupid. It’s still pretty stupid in some places, but a lot less so. And that’s always good.
I then returned to the initial reason I made the change that started all of that, which was menus! I wanted overlapping flexible menus, and now I have them. This will be used for the starting menu and the pause menu, and will be responsible for loading your game and changing your game options.
The biggest challenge for this was mostly getting the controls to work for both the mouse and keyboard smoothly and intuitively.
I was then able to return to working on the game art feeling a bit refreshed. I’ve now expanded the scenery assets to a point where I’d rather not even list them, as it’d take up too much space! I’ve also filled in the majority of the game maps, to the point where the end is in sight. You can probably infer this, but there is a lot more space, and a lot more scenery, and a lot more everything in this game than the last. A big reason this is taking longer than I estimated is what I guess could be called art creep, wherein I compulsively add this or that art asset on the fly to fill things in more.
So, for the first time, I’d like to share completed mockups of the game in action. But as tradition goes, let’s start by revisiting screenshots of the original game:
And now the new — keeping in mind of course that this is a tiny fraction of the completed environment/scenery from the game!
peltastsoftware.blog 