Devlog: doors, flags and automated backups

This week has been quite tough, so I haven't had much time, energy or mental stability to get much programming done. Some weeks are good, some are bad, we have to take them as they come. But still, here's a summary of what I could get done.

Doors

A lot of people seemed to like the way doors look in the latest game preview, so here's how they work:

• Gates are just a big hole on a wall, usually colored black when entering a place or white when exiting it - I made a customized shader to use vertex colors as emission instead of albedo. When the player crosses the threshold of a Gate, control is taken away from them, the character walks in, teleports to the corresponding exit Gate, walks out, and then player control is restored.

• Doors are interactable items. When the player interacts with them, the "entering door" animation starts - notice how there are two different animations of this kind, depending on whether the doorknob is on the left or the right side. Doors can be paired, so the player enters one and teleports to another halfway through, but that's optional: a Door can be just a barrier, so the player enters one side and exits the other without teleporting.

  Curiously, the toughest part was aligning the character's shadow as she walks through, since the animation isn't centered at her world coordinates. The shadow instead has to manually follow her hip bone. Also, see how the Door rotates to follow Ternera's hand while she holds the knob? That's entirely code-based, Doors have no animation of their own, they are just told to align to the position of the hand bone when needed.

• Tunnel doors are just barriers to block the stores of the Murani puzzle, so the player doesn't accidentally enter one of them without knowing if it's the right place. There is a regular Gate behind each one of them, linking them to either a wrong store, resetting the puzzle, or the final area, starting a boss fight.

Oct 2

I designed a couple more level flags. So far we have Cornamenta, Allegro, Megaleia and Kobold Town. I can't quite figure out how to make the flag of Mewmlinville yet, I want it to look obnoxiously colorful, yet medieval enough.

Flags of Cornamenta, Megaleia, Allegro and Kobold Town

Oct 3

I coded the checkpoints system. Now whenever the player dies, the screen distorts and fades to black, the character is quietly teleported back to the latest safe location, and her health is restored.

Also, because I'm a huge nerd, I spent all afternoon programming a little Python script that automatically creates daily encrypted back-ups of the whole project.

Oct 5

I started modeling the non-euclidean grove of level 2, Vecino forest. Same as the Murani tunnels in level 1, it isn't a priority, but puzzles are just so much fun to program. The grove will require a lot of seamless teleporting around, so textures have to be carefully planned ahead. Magic doesn't work if the audience can see the trick.