Audio, Not My Favorite

Adding sound really makes the game world feel three dimensional.
It's just that making it all is kinda tedious.

     I'm learning more about myself all the time. I now have a deeper understanding of exactly how much I don't like working on audio. When I'm searching for the right combination of bleeps & bloops with Bfxr, I don't feel the same passionate force I do when I'm drawing sprites or writing code. I'd honestly rather just have all the sounds available to me so I can just place them where they need to be. Editing things until they sound right then editing them again in Audacity feels like a lot harder for me than it really is.

    It's just my weakness presenting itself. There's no way I can handle audio on my own far into the future. Hopefully as this project comes to an end, I'll have someone willing to cover sound on board and I'll actually have money to pay for the help.

    Anyway, all of the sounds and music for stuff in the current build is in place. Back to adding features now.

Starting Unicorn Quest Audio

     Using tactics mentioned in other audio posts, I've been chipping away at the tunes and sounds of Equica. I want to do a combination of realistic sounds and 8 bit sounds in an interesting way. If you shoot a fireball you'll hear cackling flames and the initial whoosh but you'll also hear an 8-bit explosion as the fireball comes out and when it hits a wall. Hard to explain, easy to hear.

    As far as the music goes though, there's placeholders from other games for now. I'll try to match the mood I'm going for so that later on, when the game looks way more impressive, I can show it to people who may be interested in my grand plans for releasing the soundtrack separately from the game and splitting the revenue between all the music creators like this team did.

     So for I have one guy on music but I might be able to get extra help when the game looks more complete and word spreads. I'd like to find people I can work with during future projects. If I can get off the ground now, I can start simply hiring or contracting folks when I make Yotes Games a company.

Status Report #40

     Wow. I can't believe I wrote 40 of these things so far. Well I've certainly tried to be productive this week. There is a working level up system now, spells that get stronger, status effects that affect characters, and enemies that stay dead when you kill them. Find out all that was made and see them in action below!

Clearing Rooms in Equica

     Yesterday I finally finished off spell upgrades and status effects. Now each spell has 4 tiers and enemies (as well as the player) can succumb to burn damage, paralysis immobility, wet electricity weakness, and so on. The next thing I jumped onto was managing how enemies respawn in the overworld.

     To keep it as simple as possible I made an ArrayList, a dynamic list with each scene's enemy names. Enemies are placed onto the room prefab and positioned by hand and labeled "E_(name here)#", then when the player wins a battle against it that enemy's name is added to the "Kill Off These Guys" list that is ran when the overworld starts up. They will only respawn when the map loads if you came from another overworld scene and not a battle or menu. This way is pretty efficient and allows me to dynamically add baddies to scenes when I need to.