Update #3

Originally posted at https://nathanmacadam.dev/

Hello once again readers! We’re really starting to stretch the definition of a week now (School! Illness! Moving!) but we’ve pretty much wrapped up our third one. We’ve been incredibly busy with other things for the past week and a half, but we should be able to get back into a much more consistent schedule from here on out. Never mind all that though, you’re here to see video game things!

Enemies

Ethan here for this first section. I’ve been hard at work designing and creating assets for the various enemies in our game. I finished two whole models! 

Up first was this Mole Miner. Thankfully we had a mesh from a previous demo that fit this character’s body type fairly closely, so I reworked that pretty extensively and added all the mole and mining specific details.

After that, I tackled creating yet another staple of gaming, a bipedal mushroom. This big fella was made from scratch, no reused parts.It was refreshing to work on a character without fingers after the Mole!

Nathan here! I spent a couple hours last night modeling some much simpler enemies (really, it was an excuse to try some shader stuff).  They aren’t rigged or unwrapped, some aren’t completely modeled—basically they’re not ready for use in production at all yet—but I’m very happy with how they’re looking!

Continuous Integration

I spent some time this week setting up a continuous integration workflow for our project.  We’re pushing to a remote repository on GitHub, and I wanted to use GitHub’s Action workflow to run the test suite and build-test our project whenever it gets pushed to the main branch.

Fortunately, some fantastic people have already created actions and added them to the GitHub Marketplace!  Setup can be a little bit of a hassle (though I attribute that to the Actions workflow being finicky), but once you’ve got things set up it’s pretty much something you can just forget about.  Getting automatically notified if you’ve broken your game when you push a change is quite something!  I actually have a separate blog post in the works just on this topic, so keep an eye out for that!

I also tried to set up an action workflow for generating documentation for our project with each push.  That, however, was a complete failure, and I accidentally used all of my LFS space for the month in the process!

Psi Power Levels

A feature I got implemented this week was having power levels on our psi abilities.  In our game, psi abilities are more or less spells like you’d use in a typical JRPG.  Similar to how JRPGs often give you ‘upgraded’ versions of a spell, e.g. Fira → Firaga, our spells have a ‘power level’ you can cast them at, represented by a letter (if you have played EarthBound, it’s exactly like that). Note that they are not separate spells, like Fira/Firaga though; casting our own ‘Quantum’ ability means selecting ‘Quantum’ and then a power level (α, β, γ, or Ω).

One roadblock I’m currently stuck at is that, unlike the usual JRPG approach, the psi abilities in our game are given to the player as quest rewards, and are equippable.  This means that the inventory needs to hold psi abilities.  That’s all fine, as a matter of fact, I’ve had that functionality done for some time, BUT, I realized that the inventory needs to hold a sort of mutable, ‘psi ability set’ that keeps track of which levels of a psi ability the player has unlocked.  My original approach is unfortunately, not gonna work here.  I need to create a way for the inventory to hold this mutable object, but also have a system to add and remove the abilities from within that object.

Bug Fixing & Tests

The reality is I spent the majority of this week fixing minor bugs with UI and then reworking unit tests from past weeks.  I made the mistake previously of making my unit tests be more like integration tests, which worked for a little while, but wasn’t the right way to do things just yet.  I spent quite a bit of time this week rewriting tests to very specifically only test a single object, and I feel like I’m getting a much better grasp at the whole testing thing.  I’m still deathly afraid of testing the UI though.

Until next week (or otherwise), thanks!

-Nathan & Ethan