Heya stinkers. It's so tough to remember everything you've done in one month. Had some delays this month, it's been a very odd summer here in Ireland, while the rest of the planet is hitting record temperatures again (uh oh..) we've been cold and rainy, even for Ireland. My wife managed to catch a cold and wouldn't go near our baba so the normally very evenly split job of caring for him fell totally onto me! Along with looking after her, of course! She was super relieved when she could hug him again, and I was relieved to get to only do every second feed again :D (he's a very good baby I can't really complain!)

It's also my super busy season in my dayjob, body piercing. But hey that's commission baby. But anyway here's what I DID DO this month.

Storage:

I've had a bottemless box pretty much fully implemented for... roughly a year and a half but I went in and cleaned thing up to allow you to store aid items and key items in it along with weapons and ammo in their own tabs. There was some messy shit goin on where opening the storage before you ever picked up aid or a key would make the whole thing stop working :D

Treasure:

I'd already done containers earlier this year, but I went ahead and made it so containers and enemies could drop bigger amounts of cash as normal pickup items, along with the floating pips of money. You'll find wallets laying about along with some larger caches of cash in briefcases to reward exploration. Can't spend the money yet mind you but it's nice!

Keyholes cleanup:

A small task that ended up taking a few days. I cleaned up how keyholes worked, with some of the improvements I made to interactions and generally made it consistently work lol. Unfortunately this was code I wrote under extreme stress sometime in 2022 and I had to completely comb through my code to figure out how it even was supposed to work back then! I had some sort of code in the dialogue system that would allow me to have generic intros that would lead into unique text. for example "ITS LOCKED" could just end there or flow into "INSERT KEY?" just to save me time if I ever wanted to change the generic message?? Well anyway it kind of stopped working and I forgot I even made it and it broke only keyholes lol. That's what doing a hobby to escape a stressful situation does to you unfortunatly.

The Zombie encounter:

A story scene I used to test a heap of monster spawning from inside cutscenes was restored and added to the early game. It's a little homage to when Jill finds that zombie eating Kenneth in RE:1 with a little reference to The Void for flavour. (Please watch the Void it rules). If you've been following things on twitter this is the part of the early game that I was desperately trying to build up to properly, because now that you've MET the first zombie you can start actually fighting them!

Tileset update:

Not a huge thing really but I did finalise a tileset instead of using a few placeholders. The colour scheme is pretty nice and the tiles are uh... laid out in a way that makes sense now, instead of just random shit I needed thrown on a canvas!

Depth/ whatever this new version of Game Maker is

So GMS is not being supported any more, they've switched over to something called Game Maker which is not confusingly named at all. AFAIK this doesn't mess with my licence... But anyway I converted it over with only minimal issues. The biggest though was none of my objects would keep a consistent depth any more so I spent a while sorting that out...

Lighting:

Sometime in June I set up some lighting stuff, just a black layer with light sources masked out nothing too fancy but I added a load of features to my lighting object to allow for it to be at different intensities and even switch on and off. It's my hope at some point soon to get a light item into the game to let you shine where you are aiming.

Power Generator Puzzle:

The game finally has it's first puzzle. It's one of those ones where you have to add or subtract values to get the power level right before moving on. Not incredibly hard or anything but hey.

Minimap:

So after figuring out masks and having enough rooms for it to matter I build the beginnings of the minimap. It draws everything and then only peeks through a hole in the mask on the UI. That probably seems super rudimentary but before I had these minimaps that drew themselves in a space dynamically and only half worked and this is way easier. Plus at some point I'm hoping to just draw the same thing in a larger window for a full map. :3

Options menu:

I've had options for ages that I would just edit before loading the game, but I finally decided it was time to be an adult and build the damn menu. A few nice things in there got actually set up to work too, like text delay for dialogue, autoadvancing text, tutorial buttons, and a visible timer for speedrunning if you want it. That timer actually only runs during gameplay too, not in menus or cutscenes so it's VERY forgiving.

Ledgehanging:

Something I tried putting in a platformer some time in the 2010's and couldn't get right but did now. basic stuff, your player will automatically grab and hang off some ledges and climb up. I might split this into two actions later but because you can't shoot at all during the action (for the sake of my sanity I won't try to figure out shooting from a ledge hang, my lord!) but for now it flows well. It also takes into account if you are popping into a tight space like an airvent and will leave you crouched in it. Nice stuff.

Mainly did this to allow for some more freedom with building areas. I noticed, because of the short jump you have in game, while it feels right it meant a lot of platforming was done by climbing up and down ladders and making short hops, which is fine but it was leading to boring rooms! This was actually the last thing I did in July

Intro Area:

This gets it's own segment here. But the game world has been slowly but surely growing as the month went on. Doors were locked, broken doors added, a lot of platforming and some combat situations were added. You can play up until and a little past the first save room. I have one more story event to add to the end of this segment before I call it done, level wise, a set piece where you lose your overpowered starting pistol and have to work your way back to the squad. It should be exciting but I need to plot out how I'm taking that gun out of your inventory!

Load of other things that are too small to get their own thing:

Sparking broken electronics!

Animated broken doors!

Proper unique gibs for the zombies!

Autosaving!

A new save point graphic with lighting effects!

Blood decorations!

New corpse props!

A reanimated and prettied up screen transition effect!

What's next??

Man that was a lot. It's always hard for me to focus on any one thing really. I'd like to say my process is organic or something but really something will interest me one week or day and I'll work on it so there's no telling what I'll actually do.. But planned and probably doable this month:

• The end of the intro section cutscene
• Exploding walls
• A new flying enemy
• An intro to the crawlers (though I might have that happen a little later in the game)
• Crushers and other weird hazzards
• Maybe the shop but I wouldn't count on it!
• Zombie spawning animations, (Ie waking up or falling out of things)
• Grenades possibly if I can figure out how they work in your inventory?