Comatour DevLog 1 – It Begins
3/19/2022
Hello all! Welcome back!
So, I should probably explain the gap between this DevLog and the last. A couple days after I posted that DevLog, I had a medical issue with my eye that ended up requiring surgery. Of course, this operation had quite a lengthy recovery period following it, so I was unable to do basically anything for about 6 weeks. It was only a week ago that I was finally able to get back to development.
As I’m sure you can imagine, losing a month and a half threw everything I had planned off. So, with that out of the way, let’s get into the Devlog:
Thanks to life circumstances, the planned content update for ToTLS (that was supposed to release this month) isn’t ready. The intended features are still going to be added, but they’re most likely going to be split into a couple updates instead.
The first of these updates is going to add the Speedrun Mode to the game. It’ll include a timer, a death counter, and a couple achievements. There will also be a Speedrun-Practice Mode which’ll let the player jump to and from any point in the story to practice certain parts of the run.
For now, anyways, that’s all there is to report on ToTLS.
In Comatour, I’ve gotten a good bit done in this last week. However, since a lot of it is “beginning of project” stuff, it might not be that interesting to read about.
To start, I made the base sprite for the player, and slapped it onto the player-one object (foreshadowing). Then, I made a script that faces the player in the right direction when you move, along with another script that properly Pythagor-izes the diagonal movement (so moving diagonally isn’t faster than moving horizontally or vertically).
Next, I had to do a basic test for the different moves that are to be added. So, I made some messy state-machine-less code to read inputs and display a symbol above the protag accordingly. Here’s a video of one of the tests:
The reason I had to test the moves this early was because some of them are dependent on different actions like holding/releasing buttons, and I had to make sure my system for determining the difference between a “press” and a “hold” would be viable for fast-paced combat.
The conclusion I came to is that, with a little bit of fine-tuning, it’ll work perfectly.
With that out of the way, I laid the ground-work for the state machines. Since this game is going to be of a higher caliber than the one I previously completed (ToTLS), the state machines are also going to have to follow suit.
I prepared some enum that covers the meat of what I expect to be used. Along with the player-specific states, this also includes states for enemies such as patrolling, chasing, searching, engaging, and fleeing. Pictured below is this enum:
I also decided to set up some of the global variables to track things such as health and game settings.
As you can probably tell from the picture, Comatour is intended to have online peer to peer multiplayer, which hosts up to four players. Of course, this early-on it’s not in the game yet, but I will loop back to this in the DevLogs at a later date.
It’s one of the first things that’s going to be added when I get the player and a couple other things sorted out, so maybe in a couple to a few months.
After the prep work for the state machines, I put in some time on preparing the game to have customizable controls. This includes mouse/keyboard, controller, and special control schemes that let you play with one hand.
Since a large part of the game is focused on how the protagonist has to cope with losing an arm, it’s only fair that people who are actually missing an arm will be able to play the game. Being one of the first major choices I made for Comatour, the controls are designed to be simple enough that a person with one hand will be able to play at the same level as a person with both, without any in-game handicaps.
But, I’ll blab on about all that later when it’s fully in the game.
The last thing I did was start animating a run cycle for the protag. Shown below is what I’ve got so far:
Of course things are still subject to change, so there are no guarantees these will be the final run animations.
– – –
I believe that’s everything, at least for now. This first week has been pretty productive, and I can’t wait until the game starts to really take shape.
So, thanks for reading, and I’ll see y’all in the next DevLog!