I got a chance to work on some more fun stuff this month while inching closer to finishing Chapter 2.
Most of the game takes place inside the mountain Poppin and Jupa travel to, and by the time they get the Drill gadget card, it's meant to be night time. Since you're meant to travel back to older locations in the game, I wanted to make changes to Chapter 1 to reflect that passage of time, including a night sky, sleeping bandits, and a firefly enemy.
I also added a shortcut for skipping past the farm at the end of chapter 1, via a gate that only unlocks when night time rolls around (though this gif shows it during sunset)
I also really wanted to add some wild life, such as birds.
I implemented a method for allowing deeper ground tiles, including corners and slopes, to populate for any tilesets that include them. I spent a lot of time picking at more edge cases to make things line up better. However, I came to realize the number of redundancies in the current method made fixing things more complicated than it needed, so I spent a week redoing the structure of it. It's ended up being a lot easier to identify where problems are occurring and easier to resolve.
I went back to slopes, since areas of Chapter 2 end up placing them in ways where you're more likely to collide with them at weird angles, causing unintended behavior (zipping, getting stuck, etc). I resolved most of them, though there's a lingering thing to fix with steep slopes cause of it. Overall though they're less finnicky, and should make level design a little easier to set up.
One of the items you can buy from Holly allows you to carry a KO'd partner while reviving them, instead of being stuck in place. It's slow, but it gives more options for avoiding hazards.
Treasure Tracker Chip Upgrade
You won't be able to buy this until much later in the game, but I wanted to add an item that displays any visible map tiles that contain chests you haven't opened yet. But since map data is populated automatically during gameplay, it's better to add it sooner than later.
My to-do list is starting to get much shorter for Chapter 2, the next major parts of it are reworking the end boss, cleaning up the script further, and polishing up two optional places (another poison tunnel sequence, and a sequence of caves dedicated to the Rockroach enemies).
It feels doable this month, granted I want to draw something for my birthday this Sunday, so look forward to that.
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