Untitled Metroidvania

Continued polishing the visuals of certain in-game events, like when the player dies or obtains the sword ability. I refactored a bunch of my classes into singletons with static instances for ease of use across Unity scenes. I also updated my camera impulse system to be able to make the camera continuously shake for a specified period of time.

Took some time to polish some of my visuals. I added a splash particle effect that plays when the player goes into water. I also added some vine sprites that can move when the player contacts them.

My new rendering system is finally bug-free and optimized! With my new render system, the game runs on average 1.5-2x faster than it did with my old system. It turns out the issues I was having with texture bleeding and weird visual artifacts were happening because I had internally set the renderer asset of the hidden cameras to the index of the renderer asset that had the render feature attached. This caused the hidden cameras to render the render feature again, which created more hidden cameras, which rendered it again… and so on… creating an infinite cycle of recursive rendering.

Still fixing bugs with my updated rendering system. It was very poorly optimized because it had a hidden camera taking multiple captures per frame, when only one is needed. I think that’s fixed now, and it only captures once per frame as intended, but there are now weird visual artifacts that appear when multiple of these render features exist in the scene. I think that this is most likely happening because each feature submits a render request at the exact same time, causing them to confuse the render pipeline and write the hidden camera’s data to the wrong render texture. Hopefully I’ll be back soon with the fix!

Went a bit over 10 hours because I didn’t have anything to show for my work until now. I rewrote my rendering system which produces a 2D depth of field effect by blurring out the foreground and background layers. I had it working well enough previously, but I wanted to rewrite it to optimize performance and ease of use. Previously, 3 scene cameras were required, creating a heavy load with poor performance. In my updated version, only 1 scene camera is required and everything is handled internally, no complicated camera setups needed. I originally tried to achieve the effect using URP renderer lists, but this didn’t work very well because it rendered on top of the lighting pass, effectively causing everything to render without lighting. In the end, I opted to create a hidden internal camera which renders the color of the specific layers to blur, then blits the captured layers below and on top of the main scene with a blur shader, resulting in a blurred foreground and background.

Added slopes! Also added proper ability unlocking logic so the player no longer starts with every ability. Then I built this room where the player unlocks the first item in the game: the sword.

Fixed probably 10+ various bugs (I lost count). Most of them were weird edge cases with the animation system and how it interacts with the new combat system. Here are some of the main ones:

• Two swords were visible on the screen at once. (Was just an animation timing issue)
• The sword randomly disappeared and the player was no longer able to attack. (Queued attacks weren’t deleted when the player dashed, causing weird logic problems)
• Occasionally the entire screen froze up during combat requiring the player to completely reload the game. (Had to do with having multiple hitstop coroutines running at once, causing neither of them to update, which resulted in the game getting frozen indefinitely)

Now that my art style and graphics are finalized, I started working on the combat system. I added new, better animations and started working on a combo-based combat approach. Eventually, the player will be able to execute a high damage attack after chaining a few moves together. For now, the player can do a simple 2-move combo where he swings the sword back and forth. I also added a cool spark particle effect when the player hits certain enemies.

Completely updated the game’s main post processing profile. Now the graphics are much more “bloomy”, and have some color adjustments like slightly increased saturation. Check out the before and after photos of the new look!

Fixed a problem where when the player spammed dash in midair, the input still executed after the player hit the ground, which resulted in unintended input in some cases. I also mostly finished the game’s 4th room. I finally learned about the Unity sprite renderer’s tile mode, which fixed all of my previous problems with seams between rooms, specifically with the background fog sprite. (Attachment is a screenshot of the world map so far)

Added a bunch of prefabs for different background art configurations. Now I can just drag and drop prefabs into the scene to form the background, rather than copying and pasting different sprites manually, which was how I had been doing it previously.

Mostly finished the room 3 art pass.

Started filling in some of the level design for my 3rd room.

Added a few new rooms to the world. I also spent a long time fixing bugs with camera transitions, scene loading, and one enemy that kept despawning for some reason.

Added another room to the game. Also worked a bit on the room 3 art pass.

Started the art pass for room 3 and polished the room 2-3 transition.

Fixed a camera transition bug. For some reason I had the room 1 camera set to priority 10, so it automatically swapped to this camera whenever the room was loaded in (not the intentional behavior). It took me wayyyy too long to figure out why this was happening…

Fixed a weird visual seam between the first 2 rooms. Also finished polishing the visuals of the 2nd room.

sooooooo… I kinda forgot to devlog for the past 17 hours. Basically, I made a dynamic water reflection shader, as well as doing a greybox collision pass and an art pass of the first few real (non-test) rooms of the game. Getting the art to look good took by far the longest out of all this. I drew all sprites in krita, and then post processed in the Unity editor itself to achieve things like blur/depth-of-field effects, bloom, etc. Attached is a screenshot showing off the water reflection shader and a screenshot of the entire world so far. And I will make sure to devlog more often from now on!!!

Added some polish to combat, including hitstop, flashing, camera shake, and particles. Also made a glow shader to go around save points.

Save/load system now generates and saves data for each scene for things like breakable objects, collectables, etc.

Finally got around to doing a devlog. So far, my game has player movement and basic abilities, a couple basic rooms, and a save/load system. The last few days I’ve mostly been working on the title/file select screen.