Welcome to this week’s devlog. Below you can find some bullets of the highlights from the week. There are a bit more details here than in the video version. However if you prefer the video medium you can find it embedded below:

I played with iPhone app development, added audio and played with inheritance vs composition to add character attributes like strength, agility and stamina.

Highlights from the week:

• Tried to load the godot game into xcode and simulate it in a virtual iphone. I had to change mobile render to gl_compatibility in settings and the game looks a lot worse. Before that I got a particle render errror. The iPhone simulator was extremely slow and the game laggy. For a future relatively soon I’ll get an apple developer subscription so that I can run the app directly on my phone.
• I added music to the menu. This is just a record of me humming some random notes. I also added background music to the game. I used GarageBand to compose something overly simplistic (and probably musically incorrect) together. It doesn't really sound great but it makes the game feel less empty. Need to improve this, or download free music from itch.io or similar in the future.
• I’ve added stats like str, agi and stamina to both the player and the enemies. Now damage is calculated dynamically based of stats instead of a hard coded damage number.
• I’m starting to reach the limits of what is comfortable with inheritance. I want to move over to a composition based code. It feels quite difficult to strike a balance between composition and maintaining cohesion.
• Since the last devlog I’ve been spending some time live streaming when I build the game on Twitch and also when I play games to find inspiration (and for fun of course). I find it’s been very rewarding and fun to do it live as I get some good feedback from the community and also it’s a good practice to have to think out loud about what I’m doing. If you want to join these live coding sessions don’t forget to subscribe on youtube and follow me on twitch.
• I feel like I could improve the way I spend my time. I’ve been quite focused on scetching out the prototype game components like the barebones levels and a boss fight. But now I’m getting stuck doing refactoring and focusing on details that might not actually be important for the gameplay. I do enjoy the challenge. But at the same time the main focus should probably be figuring out how to make the player get hooked. Like what are the visual and audio elements that will make the game feel good and keep you playing. What are the mechanisms that will do the same? Like how should the character progression work? These are probably more important to figure out in the short term.