Man another month gone, let's open up my source tree and see what I've done!

1. Blowing up walls!

Hell yeah. Atm I have grenades dummied out so no secret exploding walls.

Just stay well back or you will be hurt.

I'm messing a little here because there isn't really much to say other than it's fun to watch.

2. A heap of new rooms

I've built up to the end of the prologue now, with the actual event that ends it coming  soon, I might go back and have some rooms branch off for exploring later but atm the prime route through the story events is good. 

There's also been some shuffling of rooms to give space for story events to trigger.

3. The power generator puzzle has a bg

That thing is massive. I've no idea if puzzles like these actually make sense in a realistic setting but they're easy concepts at least. 

There's also some dialogue that plays after , a radio call that moves the plot along, seeing as getting this this generator is your first objective.

4. Started work on Vector Font options

For readability. Did you know GM just let's you draw your ui layer at a totally different t scale without having to do much other work? It's a great feature if suddenly you want to have a font that's 16x the size of your pixel font lemme tell ya.

This is incomplete atm and a lot of ui elements need some small adjustments in position because the fonts have slightly different offsets and spacing.

Happy to have it so far along seeing as it's a pretty big accessibility issue for some people.

5. Zombie AI improvements

So these zombies are pretty dumb but they got better. They were able to jump up or over small gaps and stuff which was really fun but they don't have true pathfinding. That's still a bit beyond me..

However now they can be alerted by gunfire, they can be left in positions staring at walls instead of patrolling and now will return to wandering if they are too far from the player vertically. This has let me set up encounters where they wander over and fall down on top of the player at inopportune moments after being alerted by fighting.

6. Immersive animations that weren't needed but...

When using doors you enter and exit them, it adds something like less than a full second to transitions but it looks really nice. Plus the in game clock pauses for them!

Animations for the top of a ladder and one way platforms are there too. Just a nice immersive touch that I'm proud of :3

I'm not done with these, I'm hoping to add interact animations too. Probably something generic I can use for switches and for picking up items.

7. Enemies that wake up or otherwise spawn on triggers

I'd been meaning to do this for ages, it's on a page in my notebook from 2022! I needed these to happen for encounter design reasons. I didn't want to just teleport guys into the room with you so now they have options. Hopefully gonna add more animations to this.

8. Improved physics on blood particles

Very finally someone noticed my blood particles were behaving oddly and we tightened those up. Afaik the gibspawner object is generating at least 4 legs per zombie so things are still lacking...

And Bug fixes all over!

Fixed: Shooting an enemy at point blank range would do 0 damage but still hurt the enemy, including triggering knock downs!

Fixed: Holding an item in your inventory and exiting the inventory would cause a crash when reopening it.

Fixed: A heap of things wouldn't trigger in menus and dialogue if you were using either a controller or auto text.

Fixed: Autosaving at checkpoints was saving over random save slots and not the quicksave slot.

Fixed: You could just open the inventory anywhere at any time.

Fixed: A heap of situations would let you continue a dodgeroll or the slide on your knees after. For example you could slide into a cutscene, watch it entirely play out and then slide out of it.

What's Next?

Well it's officially the off season in my dayjob so I took on some work on another game lol. So I'll be splitting time with that. But here's the list for September, wish me luck. I managed to get two whole items from last month's list done!

1.The end of prologue scene with explosions and inventory manipulation  (I've already done a chunk of this in Sept so far!)

2.A bunch of areas involving the metal pipe weapon

3. A guy exploding that I've animated for the crawler introduction I mentioned last month

4. a flying enemy I've been working on art for that I also previously mentioned

5. maybe reintrocing grenades is in the cards finally?