7 Day Roguelike 2020: Day 7

It’s done! I spent today fleshing out the final boss fight, music, and lots and lots of playtesting and tweaking until the game felt challenging but winnable (and fun!).

Among the myriad bugs I fixed today, the most visually interesting was this one:

Not every sludge cell contains a light, as that would be too computationally expensive. Instead, just the boundary of the sludge pools are lights. This works well until you get a really big sludge pool - no light from the edges reaches the centre! The “fix” was to give each internal sludge cell a small chance of containing a light.

A less visually interesting bug I found was that when the desktop (ie. non-web) version of the game ran for more than a few minutes, changing the currently-playing sound causes the audio library to crash. I did a little digging and I can’t see any easy fix for this, so I’ve disabled audio in the desktop versions of the game. This is a shame because I think the music really fit the aesthetics of the game, but it’s not worth the instability it caused. Also I expect most players to play the web-version of the game anyway!

I’ll do a longer post with a summary of the week and links to download and play the game in a day or so. If you can’t wait, the source code is here: https://github.com/gridbugs/slime99.