Bionic Blue Devlog

[KennedyRichard]

Hello, everyone,

Since I got back into regularly developing the game, I'll be using this post as a devlog, so people following the project can stay updated on its progress.

A copy of my posts here will also be posted on pygame-ce's discord server in the gamedev- 🕹️ channel.

[KennedyRichard]

This week I worked on the options screen of the game, which is almost ready.

Now users can finally change the volume of music and sounds and change whether the game must be played in full screen or not.

Here's a video showing it:

bionic_blue_options_screen.mp4

Of course, I intend to stylize the text/controls, but this is not a priority for now.

The option to enable playtest data to be saved is not working yet. It will serve to allow users to opt-in to have their gameplay saved (as a plain text file containing the inputs/events), so they can share it for playtesting (only if they want). I also plan to hold playtesting sessions with close friends and family. When enabled, this options will cause a timestamped file to be saved in the user's home folder every time a level ends (by clearing the level or by the character dying).

The gameplay recording subsystem is mostly done and I already managed to make it work. I just need to add final touches and increment its functionality depending on requirements of the levels to be implemented.

Once the changes are finished, I'll merge them into the main branch and upload the new version to PyPI.

[KennedyRichard]

Couldn't do any development work this week because most of my time was allocated to wrapping up the final changes for Nodezator 1.5 release (released it yesterday). However, I managed to work on some animations, like this punch animation for the exoskeleton:

wip_punch_animation.mp4

The final animation will probably not include the claw in the last frame because I intend for the claw to be instantiated in the level and act as an independent object that will fly from the exoskeleton arm, attached to it only by chains.

[KennedyRichard]

I wanted the exoskeleton to look imposing in comparison to standard enemies in the game, and it did look imposing when I created it in my in-house pixel animation editor, as you can see:

However, it turns out that when seen in-game, it doesn't look imposing at all next to the standard enemies:

(environment is made of placeholder tiles and doesn't represent the final product)

This illustrates a painful lesson I had to learn: every time I create sprites, I must make sure they look good not only on the art software, but also in-game, in order to avoid producing sprites that don't have the intended look in-game, thus avoiding having to redo the sprites.

The interesting thing is that I already knew this from my personal gamedev (and pixel art) studies, but it seems this is one of those things we only firmly learn once experiencing it for ourselves.

Because of that, I've been redoing the animation using a more imposing size. This time I learned my lesson and checked its appearance in-game:

Now the exoskeleton looks like I intended next to the standard enemies.

It also required me to make additional changes in the pixel animation editor so it is more flexible with sprite sizes (before it could only handle sizes that were powers of 2, a needless limitation I imposed naively due to my lack of experience).