New this week

This week I added the main functionality for the first melee weapon and planned melee weapon for the starting character. I expected this to take far more time than it did, so I used the remaining time to add a good number of items.

As I started working on a different system, I also took some time to clean and bugfix a lot of code.

Weapon

The first melee weapon is a shovel. It has a standard melee swing and a special that acts as a parry. This special move makes the player invulnerable and totals all the damage the player takes. This damage is then charged into the next melee hit.

Adding this invulnerability forced me to add a separate invulnerability manager. A great challenge is getting various invulnerabilities such as a dash to not conflict with the shovels. An invulnerability manager solves this issue by allowing separate variables to handle the invulnerable state and only pass 1 variable to the health manager.

A future problem to work out is the animations of a melee weapon. Unlike a normal ranged weapon, the animations of a melee weapon must flow and chain. Animations also move across more of the screen so having bad blending will hurt visual appeal a ton.

Items

A good plethora of items were added. A combination of both stat boosts and special effects have been added. It should also be important to comment I added solely the functionality for the items but not the visuals for them.

I’ll break the items into 2 separate tables, so no one must fish through the boring stat boosts and the more interesting ones. All names and values are subject to change.

Basic Stat Changes
Feathered boots	+1 Jump (allows double jumps and beyond)
Helium canister	+20% Jump height
Helping hand	+0.15 haste (attack and reload speed)
Hessian sack	+5% gold retention
Owl soup	+15 health
Shoelaces	+15% movement speed
Whetstone	+15% damage

More Interesting Items
Marksman’s Coin	+10% Damage on hit (up to 300%) resets on miss
Marksman’s Lament	+5% Damage on miss (up to 50%) resets on hit
Crystaline Madness	+/- 10% damage on room clear
Big Boots	Gain burst of speed on kill (values uncertain)

I’ve noticed a glaring issue with my item system in that I don’t have a handler for truly passive items, so that’s probably the number 1 priority going forward. I’ve also adjusted scripts involving item pools to be more flexible and readable.

What’s Next?

There are 2 main priorities for the next week. Number 1 is to make a passive item system and then a few passive items to test that system. Number 2 is to adjust the on screen notification system. I upped the time it lasts for, so its readable. But it’s too slow to indicate fast stuff like Marksman’s coin. I plan on making it possible to choose how long a notification lasts for before moving to the next one. In a perfect world I would add more rows but that might be a challenge.