VV Eekly Update #13 – Miscellanea 2

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 13th edition of VV Eekly Update. For today’s post, I want to continue from last week’s post and tell you more about some miscellaneous things I’ve been working on.

I’m hopeful that soon, after a bit more work on polishing various aspects, I’ll be able to release an official-ish demo of Vyn and Verdan. We are significantly closer to reaching a real playable state! Thank you to all of you who’ve playtested it so far. Sometime this week, I’ll post on the Discord with a decently sized update to the playtest.

Tutorial

I’ve added a tutorial for Vyn and Verdan! It’s fairly basic, but covers the “influence” mechanic. I think that interaction between the two players is where Vyn and Verdan shines, but it’s also the mechanic that confuses new players the most.

The tutorial only takes a minute. One of my personal pet peeves are tutorials that take longer than they need to. No one is interested in your tutorial! They just want to play the game. Tell me as little as you need to and let me move on!

Amusingly, implementing this tutorial really shone a light on how I need to structure my code better. I had to essentially copy and paste decent chunks of the player code into a tutorial-specific scene in order to make the tutorial look like the actual game. Whoops! This is definitely one of those things that I’m going to call good enough and move on from, but I’ll learn my lesson for next time.

Lighting Improvements

If you’ve been paying really close attention to these screenshots, then maybe you can see some slight subtle differences here.

It’s not very much, but I think it makes the whole game look better!

First, each of the enemies, allies, and chest have a shadow outline to them. You can see in the lower right corner of each entity a black outline and a transparent gray outline. This makes each entity look like there’s some depth, preventing from making it look too flat.

Then, each entity also has a subtle shadowing in the bottom right corner of each sprite. You can see most clearly on the bigger beetles – the yellow color in the bottom right is slightly darker. I’m not quite sure how well this effect works, to be honest, but I’m hoping that the shadowing really emphasizes the light coming down.

Speaking of the light coming down, the light rays coming down from the top left are slightly strengthened. In my opinion, the best screen in the game is after you’ve beaten a room and the sun comes out! I wanted to evoke that more at other times, including before and during fights.

Finally, although this isn’t quite lighting, I made the background green diamonds more prevalent. I still need to come up with some other way to make the background more varied and distinct, but this can be a start.

Sound

I don’t have too much to show here yet, but I did want to call out that I’ve been lately spending a LOT of time looking at sound effects and music. The world of royalty-free music out there is a wild place.

If I was working on a more ambitious project, then I would definitely be looking to hire either a sound effect artist or a composer (or both). With my stated goals of having Vyn and Verdan be my beginner game, I didn’t think that was worthwhile. However, after having spent so much time listening to music that doesn’t quite fit… I’m not sure anymore. We’ll see what happens.

Here’s a few pieces that have caught my attention so far.

Maybe you’ll hear these in Vyn and Verdan. In a future VV Eekly Update, I’ll have more to report on music and sound effects. Stay tuned!

If you have any sound effects you would like to make for today’s VV Eekly Update, please chirp, cheep, or chatter them into the Discord!