Update 0.4

Patchnote

• New debug options in the pause menu
• New health system
• Rooms can now drop healing shields
• Minimap shows cleared rooms
• Infinite level iteration
  • The further you go in the game, the room there is by floor

Devlog

I'll try to start writing brief logs from today, and compute every informations I'll have about it.
I've read it's a good habit to have to archive all this, and I'll do my best with my actual level in English.

So those last days I had the occasion to iterate on a few things :

First was the health system. I had to scrap nearly everything I had done so far to handle a new system using an array of heart instead of a simple integer to handle health. Now it can work with values of heart (2) like Isaac is doing.
So it meant doing "half-heart" and "empty-heart" too. I used mainly basic visual assets to do so as a placeholder.
The idea is that, in the future I'll have the base to make "temporary heart" and maybe so other type, just like the blue and black heart from Isaac.
Also I've first tried physics : when hearts (health) are full, the little shield will bounce against us and rotate and move in the direction it has been pushed. It's a fun a feature I really liked and played around in BoI so I'm happy to have found a way to reproduce it in Space Rogue

Second was the minimap cleared room visualisations. For that I had to create 2 new tileset (one with the player, one without) with different colors to display where we've already been and what's left to explore. It felt satisfying as exploration is a huge part of this game, it was required to know where to go next (especially on larger levels).
But I'm still missing a key feature right now : the ability to see the whole revealed map. For the moment it's only a simple zoom on the minimap that doesn't help really. I'll need to show all the rooms, whatever the size of the map, so it'll be clear if we've already scouted every corner or it or not.

Lastly I implemented the "portal" when a boss is defeated that increments the floor level by 1. As I don't have designed AT ALL any other "world" I just up the "floor level" by 1, meaning that every new floor has more rooms than the one before.
I immediately felt like it worked as intended. As I used a lot of time on the map random generation, everything is already in place to work the way I wanted to (mainly reproducing what BoI has been doing).
There's still not new enemies, bosses, or room designs, but I have everything going for an "infinite" game loop in the present state of the game and I kinda like it !

Next things I'll work on will probably be coins and shop, keys and locked doors, and also bombs and secret/super secret rooms. Those are the next brick in the core gameplay I want to introduce.
I'm still worried about what will be fundamentally different from BoI at the time, but I sure have few ideas. Right now how the character is handled (rotation, hitbox) is already different from BoI, so it's a start, but I'll have to find "what to keep" and "what to change" at some point, and this part of the game design is something I've never really tried as it's my first real game ever.

See ya in the next update 👋