Devlog #4: New Difficulties + UI and OST Changes (Part 1)

Things are starting to look polished. I can probably get the game’s demo done by around late July. The deadline isn’t 100% confirmed, though.

Four Brand New Difficulties

I made four new difficulties. These will adjust how much room for error you have and the number of threats in each level.

• Hard: For those who have no experience and just want to have fun. No shame if this applies to you.
• Extra Hard: For rusty jumpers seeking to improve their skills. A casual, balanced experience.
• Ultra Hard: For all intermediate jumpers looking for a challenge. Serves as a fairly difficult journey.
• Extreme: For the most skilled jumpers of the universe. Not for the faint of heart.

As you can see, there are only hard difficulties in this game. This is to remind you that even on the lower difficulties, it can be a hard game. You might not think so at first, but as more mechanics are introduced, you may find yourself getting stuck on certain levels.
As shown in the recording below, for the first few levels, since they don’t contain much except platforms and fruits, I couldn’t do much except add and extend platforms for lower difficulties.

Pause Menu

In order for difficulties to be selected, I made a pause menu. I customized the UI and added multiple animations. I did end up having to redo the animations, however, as I not only realized there was UI overlap between the main pause menu and the difficulty description, but I also received a lot of warnings involving something called AnimationMixer, and I couldn’t find a way to get rid of them until I redid everything.

I also linked the difficulty chosen in the menu to the game and added a small description for each of the 4 difficulties.

New OST

Yep, there’s music being composed for the game now. Rush (from Discord), a friend of mine, is helping out on creating good music for my game. I haven’t coded it so it plays in-game yet, but I’ve imported the assets in.
I will upload the OST to a youtube channel after I make enough songs so you can listen to it whenever you want. (Keep in mind listening to the OST or checking the title may lead to spoiling the game demo.)

Minor Changes

I organized assets into more folders, but this later led me to encountering some issues involving paths to certain nodes not existing, which caused errors to appear. The issue mainly involved sound nodes like the jump sound and the death sound. Eventually, I reuploaded the sounds to each AudioStreamPlayer2D node.
Additionally, the first level’s dialogue font (level 1-1) has now been changed to match with the other levels.

Upcoming Additions

Within the next 5 hours I spend on the game, I’m hoping to add variants for each of the remaining levels for each difficulty, along with making a background music player.
I also need to add a settings menu for the player and fix multiple issues like the floating player bug (seen at the end of the recording below).