Reflex – Dev Diary 35

A very productive week this week. A large number of tweaks have been successfully completed and new levels added to the game. So, let’s get into it:

The Tutorials video player object has been reworked. When I first created I was using one object for each video tutorial, this meant there were currently 18 tutorial objects. As it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to playback videos in the Android build I would need to be able to display a single image for the tutorial I felt that I should rewrite the video player objects and so I decided to make it a single player object that could be notified of which video, or tutorial image, to display. Its easier to handle than having 20+ separate objects especially if I suddenly need to adjust something. 2 additional tutorials have also been added to the game.

The World Select screen previously allowed a player to ‘visit’ worlds they hadn’t as yet unlocked – this has been stopped.

For new players, and those that haven’t unlocked world 2, the game will skip the world select screen and jump straight to level select instead. It’s just a little something that helps streamline the game.

Loading and Saving games and settings used an extension that had a load of commands for handling ini file save games. These proved to be a little iffy when it came to the current GMS2 2.3 and I’ve been wanting to rework them for a while. I have now removed all the extension commands and have switched to using the internal json encoding/decoding commands instead. This has cut down on a lot of data processing needed to save progress.

World 3 and 4 reactors have now all been replaced with the correct Reactor objects.

The laser turret that makes an appearance in World 4 wasn’t adjusting it’s detection arc when it pointed towards a wall. It turned out that the detection code would only identify the first hit wall and use that all the time instead of scanning for the next closest wall. This has now been fixed and the detection arc (when visible) correctly adjusts so that it no longer cuts straight through a wall – potentially detecting the players missiles and destroying them!

And finally, I’ve started adding in World 4 levels. The first 7 are in and ready for testing.