(A quick note: this is the dev-log entry for the week of the 15th of April, despite being posted to IndeDB in the week of the 22nd.)
Greetings and salutations!
In place of a screenshot, this week I have a video: the full introductory cutscene to level two!
The week just past was almost entirely focussed on the above-shown cutscene:
To start with, I continued and completed work on the backdrop-elements for scene three, then implemented the scene in the cutscene itself.
Where most of the scenes in this cutscene are fairly basic, scene three is a little more complex: It shows a downwards pan from a street of Tenereth to the under-city below. To that end, it's composed of several layers, allowing both the street and the under-city to parallax as the view moves.
Getting everything to line up quite right, to move as intended, and to do so without leaving gaps between layers, proved a little tricky at times, as I recall. In particular, the under-city layers were painted in their final states, while their in-cutscene tracks start at their initial states, meaning that I was more or less working backwards.
(I also found that I'd neglected to extend those layers downwards as called for, to account for the regions exposed by the parallax effect. This, however, only incurred some additional painting, and some adjustments in the cutscene editor.)
The fourth and final scene of the cutscene was also implemented in the week just past. (I had painted the backdrop in a previous week.) This one is a simple scene: just a slow zoom on a doorway, with text overlaying it.
With all of that done, I moved on to finding music for the cutscene. After much searching, I ended up using a piece that I already had to hand, having used it in previous cutscenes. While perhaps not perfect, I think that it works fairly well here.
And with that, as shown above, the intro. cutscene to level two is now complete! ^_^
Along the way, I discovered that the alternate-ending cutscene had broken at some point. Specifically, the code that attempts to import a custom cutscene-script was failing in the case of the alternate-ending: there was no such script, and the code was throwing an error that I wasn't handling. As this cutscene had previously worked, my guess is that the error thrown in this situation changed between Python 2.7 and Python 3.
To fix the problem, I simply added a stub-script to the cutscene. Not perhaps an ideal solution, but an expedient one.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
