Summary

• Added 3 new music tracks
• Added sound effects for most actions
• Added rain effect
• Fixed UI bugs

Hi all, just want to thank everyone again for the huge amount of support from twitter over the past couple of days. It has really brightened up my week and seeing all this support has motivated me beyond belief. I'm going to start a heavier development cycle for this so expect updates to be much more frequent. But let's get down to business.

Audio

I've started work on some ambient music tracks for the game, as well as implementing sound effects to most actions. So far 3 songs have been made titled Rain, Dark, and Dark2. I wanted Rain to instill a feeling of relaxation, but with a hint of strangeness. This is evident in the strange synth hits throughout the song. Dark and Dark2 are to be used in caves and dungeons to express paranoia. The idea that you never know what terrible monster lurks around the next corner is something that interests me and I wanted to express that by adding some strange sound effects throughout the pieces.

Additionally, I have added numerous sound effects from the RPG SFX PACK provided by Gravity Sounds. All in all, the pack provides some simple sound effects that can be used for various actions within the game. Best of all, its free to use.

Looking forward, I would like to add a lot more music tracks and have them influenced by a new genre i recently discovered called "Dungeon-Synth". It aims to emulate old PC RPG music and I think it would work perfectly within the game. Most dungeon-synth tracks have a lot of metal influence which results in a lot of it being dark and gloomy. However, there are a group of albums called Fief(I-IV) that take on a much lighter theme. I recommend taking a look at the youtube channel Fief(I-IV) were posted on. It's a huge collection of dungeon synth albums i've been listening to during development recently and will look into integrating that style in future tracks.

Weather

The most recent(and popular) feature that has been implemented is rain. I got the idea to add rain after making the music track of the same name. I figured it would add a lot more atmosphere to the outside areas. Originally, i made a more traditional roguelike rain effect using sprites travelling from the top of the screen to the bottom.

However, after some contemplation, i scrapped it and tried something new. I decided it would probably be cooler to get some 3Dish top down rain that falls onto the game. Using some fancy vector math and some splashing effects, we get this. Keep in mind, these are all still 2D lines but they give the illusion of 3D based on where the camera is focused.

In the future, im planning on adding some other weather effects such as lightning strikes, and snow. I think this system adds a lot of personality to the scenes i'm creating.

Bugfixes

Just before this post, i've been ironing out some bugs involving the UI. For some reason, the "level-up" popup would be displayed awkwardly based on where the camera was in the game. The same appeared to happen with the death screen. It turned out the two UI elements were not being drawn to the screen but rather an ingame coordinate. Easy fix!

Thanks,

Jason Accardo

https://twitter.com/thinginger