05-08-2021 The last two weeks were mostly spent working on sounds and music and getting the game to run outside the Godot IDE (Integrated Development Environment). That last part was to be expected. Running a game inside an IDE gives it access to certain features it might not have when running a build of the game outside the IDE. In this case a few files couldn’t be loaded at runtime, which had to be fixed and, apparently, there’s a small bug in Godot that when you run multiple buses within your audio server it will prevent certain sound features from being accessed (e.g. volume can’t be changed). Besides the aforementioned areas, progress has also been made capturing the game state in a save file.

Error when running multiple audio buses
To explain this a little bit further; Godot has an AudioServer interface that can contain multiple audio channels called ‘buses’. There’s always a ‘Master’ bus that encompasses all sound, but it’s possible to add (sub)buses which can be used to separate music and sound effects. This allows the user to have different volume settings for sound and music. How the buses are arranged is captured in a bus layout file.
However, for some reason Godot does not like multiple buses in the default bus layout file, so a copy had to be made of this layout which has to be loaded at runtime to prevent errors when changing the volume or turning sound on or off. It’s a workaround but at least now the game functions as intended when build.

Sounds & Music
Having added a few sounds and music has added a lot of atmosphere to the game. It was important to explore this area of the game further. Finding out what kind of audio fits this theme and which direction to go with it.

The music was composed by Jonathan Shaw (www.jshaw.co.uk), a very experienced composer of game music. Highly recommended for any game developer that lacks resources in this particular area.

Saving the game
Before implementing a save feature, choices had to be made about the entire save system. Should the user be allowed to have multiple save games? Should users be able to have one or multiple profiles? How would being able to save impact gameplay (e.g. *save-scumming)?

To keep things simple the choice was made to have one profile per (Windows) user. The game will save progress on one story, which can later be loaded from the main menu. This save will be overwritten when the user starts a new game making it easier to maintain and develop, but will limit the user’s flexibility to a certain degree. This won’t prevent save-scumming though.

*Save-scumming: saving the game before a difficult part and reloading the game after every failed attempt until one succeeds. This circumvents part of the difficulty of a game. In some cases exactly what makes a game fun, in other cases it can provide hollow victories.

Development changes
Disclaimer: everything stated below is susceptible to changes in the future.

  • Added music for the intro, main menu and battle scene
  • Added sounds for the main menu, interface and characters
    • Buttons have on hover and on click sounds
    • Book opening/closing and page flip sounds
    • Characters now each have their own unique attack sound
  • Character Healing ability
    • Mana has been implemented (the fuel for casting magic spells and performing magic attacks). However, the UI does not yet show the amount a character has.
  • Added save functionality which can be expanded to include characters’ statistics, in-game progress and other relevant information.
  • Bugfixes:
    • On death sounds failed to play when a character died from an area-of-effect attack or incorrectly played when a character had already died
    • Build version of the game threw multiple errors concerning loading assets at runtime and the default audio bus layout

Current state of the game demo

Upcoming changes

  • Thorns ability
  • Character creation / random enemy party creation
  • Overarching game shell
    • The idea of the game taking place inside a book will be fleshed out more.
  • Extra on hit graphic effects
    • e.g. character is engulfed in flames when hit by the knight’s fire attack
  • Mana
    • Mana will be represented in the character UI
  • Sounds
    • Characters will be provided with unique on hit and on death sounds
  • More speech bubble events
    • Speech bubbles will be randomly shown on attack, hit, death, etc.