The Sound of Shadow Devlog

Oct 8

New assignment. Create an audio-based game.

Idea 1: Relaxing simulator. The player is tasked with maintaining some kind of rhythm as more and more sounds start playing, making it harder to concentrate. You play until you lose. The game is meant to be funny. 

Variant: Musical genius simulator

Ideas from the ether are coming to you, and you have to press keys in accordance with it. But other noises are happening.

Idea 2: Some kind of horror game? Your only clues about the enemy’s location is sound based.

Idea 3: Hidden Message Decipher-er. A variety of sound clips are provided to the player, and they must use controls like playing clips backwards, slowing, or speeding them up in order to decipher a code.

Oct 15

While I thought the idea of a comedic relaxing simulator was pretty fun, I could not think of a way to game-ify the act of doing nothing. If there’s a solution to that question, I don’t know it and don’t have time to figure it out. So the idea I’m actually going with is something completely different. For this game, the player controls a samurai-esque character rooted to the centre of a 3d gameworld, which is almost entirely black except for a small spotlight which illuminates the player character. By moving the mouse, the player spins in place. Invisible enemies will spawn and approach from out in the darkness, and the player will have to listen for their footsteps and attack at the right moment.

I decided this would be a fine opportunity to start playing with 3d. I think this concept wouldn’t really work in 2d because I want to simulate a real sense of direction, and real people are attuned to living in a 3d world. 

I am considering adding a parry mechanic, so that the player will have to first block the incoming strike when they hear the sound, then immediately follow up with an attack. I think this might be necessary so that the player has an action they can take to avoid losing even if they haven’t properly located the incoming enemy.

I think the game is simply going to be a “keep playing until you lose” kind of deal. Each defeated enemy will add to a score. Just try to get a high score!

In any case, in terms of actual development, I’ve got the basics of looking around and enemy spawning set up. Next, I’ll have to figure out the strike and parry mechanics. Honestly, once I have that, I’ve pretty much got the gameplay done. 

OCT 22

I spent quite a while trying to puzzle out the game logic, but I think it’s all there now. I don’t know if it was really the right move, but I basically have a system where the enemy and the player are both communicating with the main gameplay scene via a signal bus.(which I learned about in the last project and I’m a very big fan) 

The gameplay scene takes in the signals and switches certain bool values to true. We do some boolean logic to check if the values are all correct for a particular outcome, and the gameplay scene then tells the enemy and player what to do. All that is a fancy way of saying, you can block enemy attacks, retaliate, and kill the enemy. Of course, it’s all pretty much being played through the print output right now. There’s no actual sound other than the footsteps. I spent a good while gathering and mixing sound effects last night. I’ll get working on an audio manager and get working on integrating them. Once the sounds are in, I’ll update the placeholder artwork. After that, we move on to UI.

Oct 25

I’ve hit a bit of a slump right now. It’s a bit like how it was with the puzzle game. I’ve got a system that technically functions, but I don’t really know how to scale it. Just make it get faster? At what point does it become impossible to continue? Obviously more types of enemies would add more interesting variety but I’ve only got a few more days to work on this, so I can’t really be adding any entirely new systems at this point. 

The way this part of the dev process seems to sneak up on me kinda makes me laugh. I realized that I'm really concerning myself with how to actually make things that work for the time being. Making a proper “fun” game is a big challenge, even for a small project. 

I’ve been putting off making the main menu because I find it a bit boring, but I think I’ll try to take care of it now.

Oct 26

After banging my head against the wall trying to get the menus to work–which I did eventually succeed at–I made the very rational decision to totally refactor everything! 

Why, you ask? Because I coded myself into a corner and adding/changing features was a huge pain. I didn’t want to implement state machines because the actors had so few states they could be in, and that’s still true, but I was ending up with code so spaghetti-esque I couldn’t even keep it straight. I realized there’s no reason for the player and enemy to communicate with the gameplay scene, because the signal bus enables them to communicate directly with each other. That’s the whole point of having a signal bus.

I’m doing this because I think it’s very important to be able to scale up the difficulty as time goes on! So, I’m implementing a “wave” mechanic, where a timer in the main scene counts 90 seconds, then increments all the enemy’s stats up a little bit. Trust me, this is going to be a huge headache to implement without refactoring. Granted it may still be a headache, just not as huge. 

It’s so funny how much this project has gotten away from me.

Oct 27 

 Refactoring went fairly well, and I believe everything is running bug-free now. I’ve finally got something complete-ish so I feel good about uploading to itch now, and hopefully getting a little bit of feedback before I need to submit the assignment. All that’s left to do now is replace the placeholder art.