Most of the work for the past two weeks has involved lots of polishing, some businessing, and a bit of making-world-2-ing. Of these three activities, I can talk about polishing.
First, I fixed several bugs. Currently, my development process is an absolute mess (and I just took a software engineering class in college too). Basically, at the moment I add everything I can think of for a certain feature to work and then try to see if it does. If it doesn't, I add the missing parts. Sometimes this might break horrifically later down the line.
I added additional functionality to the level selection screens to inform players as to which levels they must beat in order to progress and which stages are optional. I also added unlock messages, where if the player unlocks a world or skin after having beaten a level, the game informs them of such when they return to the map screen.
Part of the polishing had to do with intro, death, and conclusion sequences for the individual levels, something that many gamers and beginning developers don't even notice as a part of the game. When a level begins, the screen fades from black into the starting section as the player's ship teleports into position. Once the black has fully faded and the ship has fully phased in, the player gains control. This sequence is very quick (less than a second, actually) but adds an extra layer of professional flair to the game and even a bit of narrative context.
The death sequence has been made to be quick, so as to lower player frustration and waiting. First, on ship impact, the game pauses for a very brief moment (1/60 of a second). This is similar to what the Mario games do, showing the player very clearly that they indeed made a mistake (lowers frustration by showing the valid collisions at play) and helps add shock to the explosion to follow. After the quick explosion, there is a fade to white and then fade from white into the stage intro. To accomplish this pause, I take a screen of the current game state, save it to memory, deactivate all of the current game instances, and then display the screenshot I saved. This caused a game crashing bug simply because I forgot to delete the screens, leading to an overflow of whatever heap is allocated by Game Maker Studio (or whatever happens behind the scenes there).
Finally, the winning sequence involves celebratory text as in the example below:
Again, this text helps ever so slightly to provide basic context and world building. I might add more flair to the victory sequence later, but that depends on whether or not sound the design is able to do the rest of the work.
My current goal is to finish creating all of the graphical assets, gameplay elements, and menu systems before I return to school so that the only major development task I need to accomplish when I am more burdened is level design, the part I have the most motivation to do. Let's see how this goes!
