Work Since Last Devlog
Player Handling
Added handling for some special cases when the player launches a projectile while holding the down direction. Normally, the shot would be aimed downwards, which works well for mid-air attacks, or when standing on a jump-through platform. When on solid ground, though, the shot immediately bounces upward. So the downward part of that is now ignored if the player is on solid ground, or on a slope which is uphill in the direction that the shot is going.
I’d like to have another special case where the player can shoot projectiles down a solid ledge while standing on top of it, temporarily ignoring the solid block that’s in the way, but I’m concerned this will have unwanted side effects somewhere else. Maybe come back to this near the end of development.
Graphics
Last week. I fixed the draw origin for quads so that rotation would happen at the center point. I’ve now added an optional rotation variable to every animation frame, and also to every sprite instance so that they can now be properly accessed at the project level. When both the animation frame and sprite instance have rotation values, they are added together. I also added variables for the horizontal and vertical shearing factor arguments as well, although like rotation at non-90-degree angles, they also have artifact issues when linear interpolation is enabled.
Performance
I noticed framerate issues when multiple bouncing projectiles collide with sloped terrain, so I made a testing room full of slopes and turned on a profiler to see which functions were taking up the most time. I wasn’t able to get this test case running 100% smoothly, but overall performance does seem to be better and have fewer instances of stuttering now.
Thoughts
So there’s no screenshot this time because there is nothing noticeably different, just bug fixes and tweaks. The first half of the week was fairly productive, but then I caught something and was stuck in bed. Not good. The year’s almost over and I’ve still only got what is essentially just a walkabout demo. I really need to make some damn progress next week.
Plans For Next Post
- Same as before. Quit futzing with technical stuff and work on the damn game!
