Cintrianna’s Forge

Goal 1: New Menu

This was a bigger job than I thought it would be. The menu has been updated and is ready to be pushed to production. The big focus was to get Marathon Mode to be front and center. It was causing some confusion when players were loading bonus game modes when first playing.

I think the game still requires a tutorial and a daily logon bonus features. With the menu cleaned up I am more willing to share it around more. The update has not been pushed just yet, but I will work on getting it submitted soon.

Extra: Effects in Sprint Mode

I found it a little annoying that sometimes Cintrianna would go into her struggling state without me realizing when playing the Sprint Mode. To remediate this, I have added a red flash and a sound effect when she triggers her struggling state.

Extra: Bugfix

I have a friend who has really got into Cintrianna’s Forge and I am deeply flattered and grateful that he is enjoying the game. He reported a bug to me over some late-night burritos and I was able to replicate it. If you are still entering a move when sprint ends, It will allow you to input a move after the game over screen pops up. This has been fixed!

Knott and the Waking Wilds

Goal 2: Knock-back 2.0

Knock-back 2.0 is working as expected. Some major balance changes need to be made, however tweaking is all part of the process. Weapons have an innate Knock-back stat which can be set from a scale of Nothing/Lowest to Highest. The engine sees this as a scale of 0 to 5.

In order for an entity to get the most out of a Knock-back weapon they need to have the strength score to go with it. A strength of 1 will limit the Knock-back to 1. As Knott levels up from finding collectables, you can leverage larger weapons Knock-back stat by increasing your strength stat.

See below for a comparison Level 1 Strength Knott, and a Level 5 Strength Knott (Level 5 needs to reeled in a bit but it’s all part of the process.)

Goal 3: Fall Tiles

This while it works, I am really not a fan of the implementation. Originally, I had one tile for each hole. After some reflection, I did not like the fact that a room could have up to 100 tiles just listening for entities.

The second attempt I added two listening zones. The first is a sort of drag zone that pulls you into the pit. This allows for the player to attempt to recover from the mistake. The second is the fall zone, this zone triggers the fall function and causes the player to respawn at the entrance of the room.

While the above works, I don’t like the implementation for two reasons.

1. I have to manually create each fall zone instead of them automatically being created via tileset.
2. Falling magnets have to be placed to pull the player the correct direction.

This is a decent placeholder to get the internal test released. My main priority is getting the dungeon together to begin play-testing. Now that the pits have been created, the jumping flags should be good to create.

Extra: Damage Hearts

It was a little difficult to identify the damage done and taken, In addition to the health bar, I implemented a little system that shows the damage done and taken as little hearts popping out. I added a little bit of a delayed pop at the end as it really acts as a satisfying end to the animation.

Extra: Rooms and Camera

With the additional time I had I also created the room and camera snap system. When entering a room, the system will perform the following…

1. Set the spawn point to the nearest respawn marker.
2. Lock the camera to the center of the room.

If the player is not in a room it will then snap the camera onto the player in singleplayer or the centre point of the players if a multiplayer game.

Next Week’s Goals

Cintrianna’s Forge

Goal 1 - Push update into Production.

While this is self-explanatory. however it would be nice to push the Cintrianna’s Forge update into production. Not a big deal, however, I will have to take new screenshots to update the photos on the Google and Apple store pages.

Knott and the Waking Wilds

Goal 2 - Item Drops and Staggering

Because weapons will degrade over use, I need enemy's to drop their equipment once defeated. This should be as simple as spawning the weapon at the feet of the enemy killed with a tiny loot animation attached to it.

The plan is that enemies generally will spawn is more used up broken weapons and fresh brand new weapons can be purchased at town. If the player has no weapon, they will have a bit of a shove ramming attack they can use to stun and try cause the enemy to drop their weapon. However, a pot or rock will do an excellent job at making them drop their weapon.

Goal 3 - Item Durability

With avenues to gain new weapons it only makes sense to also start working on ways to take them away. Weapons break after time with only a rare handful regenerating their durability (Mainly Staves.) Once this is complete more weapons will have to be made to accommodate. I don’t want people obsessing too much with hoarding items. So maybe the addition of secret weapon chambers around dungeons would help people be a little more liberal with their use.

Recommendations

The Joe Rogan Experience - #2167 - Noland Arbaugh

Say what you want about Joe Rogan, I do enjoy having him and his guests in the background while I am working on something that requires my physical attention but not my hearing.

In episode #2167 he has a conversation with Noland Arbaugh, Who was the first human recipient of the Nerualink brain implant. Really fascinating to hear the firsthand experience of him using the chip and how it provided someone paralysed from the shoulders down a new way to interface with a computer.

What was really cool was getting his thoughts on how he is using it to interface with games and evolving his ability to control them from thinking about hand movements to just thinking trigger this action. With his expectations being the peak of the interface to act as an aim-bot. If you just want to hear his experience with games, you can skip to about 1:09:00.

They also mentioned the potential to use VR to match the thought patterns of physical movements in a VR space. Which would become absolutely groundbreaking if you are able to think of moving your arms and hands to interact with a VR environment.

Thank you for your support!

If you got this far, thanks for reading! If you would like to try some of my games mentioned above feel free to interact with the links below!