Reflex – Dev Diary 34

This week I turned my attention to a few other things in the game instead of level construction.

I had decided a while ago that each world would have a different looking reactor. All the reactors would be constructed from the same components so that they all looked similar, but at the same time different. So, I went back to my 3D Reactor model and built up 3 additional reactors (World 1 and 2 already had different reactors) along with their destroyed counterparts.

Once the 3d models had been rendered I then have to take them in Affinity Photo and apply the shadowing and any other pixel level tweaks I need before exporting the resulting PNGs for importing into the game.

Once in the game I have to enter in the coordinates for the tracer lights that animate across the reactors turbines.

Next up was video playback. As mentioned a few dev diaries ago I had created a video intro for my logo that would need to play at the start of the game, but as well as that I wanted to be able to create and play story intro and outros and potentially replace the tutorial animations (these are frame based animations and take up a great deal of texture memory).

I originally purchased an extension from YoYoGames marketplace called GMLVideo which claims to playback on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. It comes with a small application that converts an mp4 file into a vid file (proprietary format). Unfortunately I couldn’t get the converter to do anything so I have to try something else.

So instead I gave another extension ago. This one will only play on Windows so I will need to locate a solution for Android later (and potentially Mac). The extension can playback mp4 files directly so that was a bonus.

After about an hour of working everything out I had the logo video playing back perfectly.

The next job was to recreate all the tutorials. Each tutorial I had previously (14 of them) ran at different frames per second depending on how complex the tutorial was and what I could get away with. This meant that some were a bit jittery. By being able to use videos as tutorials I could recreate them all at 30fps. The process to update the 14 existing and 6 new videos took quite a while and adding in a video controller object that would draw the video in the objectives panel in the right place and depth was a challenge but I’m happy to report that it’s all done and looking amazing. There will be more tutorials to create as I proceed through World 4 and 5 but I have the pipeline all sorted.

And finally. A small number of bugs have been fixed including the laser turrets beam that didn’t disconnect the connected towers beam on destruction.