Devlog #9: The Last Challenge and Stat Board

We’re nearing the end of this part of the journey. I can’t believe this is only the demo part of the entire game that I’m making.

Demo Boss Fight

This is the last challenge of the game. Like I said last devlog, I don’t want to spoil the boss fight, and I don’t see any way to censor text for Stardance.

So here’s a Google Doc for those who’d rather just see the spoilers rather than find out by playing the game’s demo.

I’m pretty happy with the boss fight as it is. I don’t believe I’ll need to rework it (except for balancing purposes).

I did die a lot on the boss fight, though (19 deaths).

Stat/Death Board

At the end of the demo, I decided to let the player see their stats on the board, including the amount of time it took for them to finish the game, how many times they died to specific causes, etc.
I did end up having to globally track every death and the cause of each death using an array (if you don’t know what that is, think of a buffet where you get to decide how much of each of the foods are in each area).

Copyright Problems

I recently learned more about copyright policy and it turns out I cannot use music my friend Rush made, even though he gave verbal permission. We appear to need some sort of agreement as well. But I don’t want to get too deep into the legal stuff, so I’m going to have to make my own track to replace the current one soon. Honestly, I might just attempt to use a CC0 track since I’m running out of time currently.

Because of this issue, I muted the audio of the gameplay footage below too.

Minor Details and Changes

Not as much going around this week, but nevertheless, here’s most of the small changes:

• Added apples to all difficulty variants of levels 1-9 and 1-11
• Added disappearing animation for the player that plays after the death animation (overall looks better in my opinion)

Upcoming Additions

Of course, there’s work that still needs to be done. First of all, I haven’t finished the settings menu yet (if you remember from devlog 6).

There’s also some tracks in the game I need to make (for the boss fight, the area ambience, etc) And most importantly, we can’t forget about the commentary that occurs when you die to specific traps/enemies (which I’ve already started).

I’m hoping I can release this game by late-September at the latest, along with working on some Stardance missions. I’d like to maximize my coding time before Stardance ends, despite the fact I’m busy with all the homework I’m getting. :(