Final Devlog <3

LOTS of tweaks:

• Better hitsound
• UI audio balancing
• UI click sounds
• Add W/Up arrow to keybinds
• Finish demo map
• Fix stereo issues with UI noises
• Add better notices
• Looping title music
• Volume in settings
• Minor changes to title UI (visualizer)
• Minor changes to score UI
  And MUCH, MUCH more (I forgot most of it). I sent a copy to sm ppl and asked them to test 😭 everything finally works yippee!!

If you would like to see the entire game, video is here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Xa9AA1s14

Additionally, a demo ship is coming VERY soon.

Thank you all so much for following along with my journey making this. I did NOT expect to be the most followed project in the event. Thank you <33

Score menu!

• Rank is calculated based on damage
• More damage = lower rank
• Colour changes depending on rank achieved
• Returns to song selection screen
• Message on completion

Mapping!!! (+tweaks)

• Mapped more of FRACTURED//ANOMALY!
• I love the way the second buildup looks!!
• Fixed a small bug that made parts of the editor UI very vertically small
• Mostly mapping ts devlog!

Mapping + Fixes + SONG RELEASE

• Mapping more of the song

• Fixed timing with laser hold, now ends exactly when it’s supposed to

• Updated project name

• Visualizer optimizations (got rid of the line because not only did it look bad, but it was a performance sink_

• FRACTURED//ANOMALY IS NOW OUT PLEASE GO CHECK IT OUT
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNtMej4kIsU

Working UIs

• Selecting a song actually puts you into that song now!
• Ability to exit out of the big button (click outside or esc)
• Picker auto selects first song to avoid placeholder text

Picker UI!

Improving the picker UI right now. I want the button to be as satisfying as possible for entering a map, kind of like Mario Kart World! I also switched to a more Beat Saber-like preview system where clicking opens the map in detail in the side menu!

Menu work!

• Added proper support for picking a map and entering it
• Added the ability to choose categories and pick songs from categories
• Upon finishing a song, player is taken back to selection screen

Song Picker UI + Mapping!

• Started properly working on the UI to pick songs!
• Very basic mockup, I plan to make it look a little nicer later!
• Kept mapping FRACTURED//ANOMALY
• Experimenting with different gameplay gimmicks and ideas to make it as fun as possible!

Smear + Positioning!

I genuinely cannot express how much I hate trying to position things with code. I spent SO long trying to figure out how to smear properly and how to make it so the laser would move properly on rotation. I DID finally end up getting it to work but in a very janky way. It’s just a sprite that goes from white -> transparent that is scaled depending on the speed of the laser and it fades in and out. I obviously only want it to show when it’s moving! It took me SO long to get all the values right to the point where it actually showed, and right to the point where it actually looked like smear and not just a massive wall of coloured rectangle. The system MOSTLY works I just have to take into account direction when I do the movement because the direction is super annoying.

Goals for tomorrow:

• Make smear and movement perfect
• Add a tracking laser that tracks the player’s movement and releases shortly before firing
• Fix every bug I see with laser movement
• Work on song picker UI!

I NEED to get this done by April 30 UHUGHFLKJGHDFJKGDFJKGDFJKG

Laser movement!

Started working on adding laser movement! Right now the standard single laser event can move the laser with optional easing in any direction at any speed! Video shows only one use case of this, though there are MANY cases where this would look super cool! I’m gna work on adding this to other laser events too so they can look EVEN COOLER.

OST!!

I have NOT stopped working on this for the past week. I’ve just been working on OST! I prefer not to use lapse to track because I feel rushed when I track time. I had a bit of unlogged time from Godot so I decided to use that to devlog ts!

First video is my first time trying to make hardstyle/frenchcore! Second video is a genre I have experience (euphoric techno) ik they’re both kinda mid but it’s the best I can do and I’d rather have a fully custom made OST than use other songs 🥹🤞

Major bug fix!

• On beat SIX SEVEN I had a bunch of events spammed and a weirdly placed event. I’m not exactly sure what happened to it but it would just stop the entire map after beat 67. Song would still go on, but no more events would happen. The issue was fixed by updating my “if crossed do event” check to include passed triggers. This took me SO long and I’m SO happy I’m finally done with it. 67 is no longer funny to be after ts 🥀

OPTIMIZATIONS/REFACTOR GALORE

• Most camera effects now rely on signals instead of checking every frame if it changed

• lerpf weights for camera effects are now capped at 1, fixing the camera seizures at low frame rates

• Visualizer now uses arithmetic to smoothen points when smooth is enabled instead of using Curve2D and baking points every frame (massive improvement)

• Visualizer now accurately respects the showing of the line

• Fixed an editor issue that rounded decimal pos placements (scale is from 0-10)

• Lasers no longer poll every frame for player collision

• Some values are only set once instead of every frame in _process

• Removed dead code

• Lowered fog resolution and size to fit world bounds better

• Fully re-did dust particles to be much more efficient

• And worked on the map/song a tiny bit!

Finished the FIRST OST SONG YIPPPPEEEEEE y’all dont get to hear the whole thing until launch tho

And started making a map for it (im bad at my own game sighhhh)

I also noticed that the platform flashes on intro, I can probably make it so that it automatically starts with the first colour event instead of defaulting to pink and then going to the first colour event. Easy fix!

DEVLOG NUMBER SIX SEVEN

• Big changes to the player movement motion blur system!
• It now only blurs in the direction it’s going instead of propagating out both ways
• Vertical motion blur depends on how high you start the slam from
• • Other minor changes/optimizations in the player script

• Camera rotation on movement + improvements to the way the player script handles camera events!
• Complete refactor of the way the UI system handles animation! There’s a method in the global script that takes a control deriving node as an argument. It connects mouse/click functions and hover/click animations! It’s super tuff
• Enabled physics interpolation so everything is BUTTERY smooth now! (not really visible in the video)

• Zooming in on the camera now makes it move slightly downwards to compensate for Y offset
• Modifying intensity of glitch shader now modifies chromatic aberration from shader
• Fixed an issue where the editor wouldn’t handle singular colour values correctly!

• some other stuff I forgot!

OPTIMIZATIONS AND FIXES

Modified the audio bus stuff a LOT because as it turns out I broke most of it. I removed the in-game normalization because it was just making the audio sound worse and not really work. I’ll add a normalization tutorial to the editor documentation! I also optimized the laser system a little bit (FPS used to drop as low as 65 (from 120) when lots of lasers were spawned. That’s fixed now! Monitoring also gets disabled upon finishing so it stops caring about everything! (furthering performance) Game runs much nicer now!

(song in video is mine!! will be part of the ost!!)

New icon and logo!! I love photoshop!!

No more picking folders manually! The editor handles that for you! Everything saves to documents/lightbound-data/wip (and /custom for upcoming custom maps)

Added audio normalization to the music bus! Now all imported audio will be automatically normalized so the mapper doesn’t have to manually do it! Also updated visualizer logic and it looks a little worse than before, but it’s also a lot more compatible as I’ve tested with a few songs now! I feel like the audio sounds broken now because of the limiter but I’ll prolly fix that later, I’m too sick to actually notice small details rn 💔.

• worked on the song picker a little bit! it shows the album cover now!

Fixes and refactoring!!

• Re did beat calculation system to use a function that converts the song’s time to a beat, taking into account BPM changes, avoiding drift! (this system was already in use in the editor, so I just transferred it over)

• Complete re-factor of the player script. It was extremely broken and inefficient. The camera zoom system and the camera kick system were the most affected! It actually works well now!

• Some regex fixes in the editor.

• There is now a delay between entering the game and the song starting, + a fade in!

• Fixed unsaved changes messages always showing up even if it matches

Menus!

• Made a very basic song selection menu
• Improved main title screen
• Added fade ins (I know it flashes for a split second, I’ll prolly fix that soon!)
• Made OST and EXTRAS category pull directly from game files, CUSTOM category will be auto generated from a directory!
• I LOVE the quit animation SO MUCH it’s so cool!!
• The buttons scaling to y=0 looks kind of weird, so I’ll end up changing that soon!

REBRANDD!!!! After a LOT of discussion in my personal I landed upon LIGHT//BOUND! I like the name it’s lowk cool! Re-did a lot of the stuff in the title too. AND ADDED A QUIT ANIMATIONNN it looks so cool!! I love it!!

• Title screen!!
• Visualizer fixes
• Hits are now detected! (not demo’d since I don’t actually have a map rn + it’s not fully finished)
• Bug fixes in editor
• Title screen effects
• Unsaved changes popup on leaving editor!
• Rotation now applies to laser circles too! (not sure why it didn’t before)

BUG FIXES GALORE

Editor:

• Fixed an issue where rotations wouldn’t properly take effect in the main map
• Fixed an issue where certain values wouldn’t save
• Fixed an issue where certain values saved in the wrong format and couldn’t load
• Make some systems more consistent
• Ability to move events with Shift + <-/->
• Fixed crappy regex evaluation causing the game to crash
• Fixed type handling with direction values

Main game:

• Added the framework for damage (doesn’t work yet for some reason)
• Added the framework for iframes (doesn’t work if damage doesn’t)
• Added the framework for miss sounds (DOESN’T WORK BECAUSE THE DAMGE DOESN’T WORK EITHERJKSDHFKLJSDF)

Systems:

• Fixes to global prefire calculation handling
• Fixes to duplication/reference issues relating to modifying, saving, and loading

And probably more! + I also worked on a song for this (y’all will get to hear later!)

JGSHDFKJGHF EDITOR SCALING WORKS YES YES YESYESE S YESYESESY

I HAD A BUG WHERE IT WOULD ALWAYS OFFSET ITSELF WEIRDLY. I GOT SICK AND HANDED IT OFF TO AI, IT COULDN’T DO ANYTHING. NOTHING. I DID IT MYSELF. IT WAS SO HARDSAF AS IT TURNS OUT I ACCIDENTALLY HARDCODED THE 300 VALUE IN SOMEHOW INSTEAD OF USING EVENT_WIDTH.

IT WORKS NOW

Copy pasting works now!! There’s some display stuff I should probably do to make it easier to use + update some stuff more often. BUT I DID THE HARDEST PART YIPPPEEEEE editor is SO close to being done now!

Most dreaded part of this entire project icl

Copy pasting in the editor! I have the basis down but it is EXTREMELY buggy and annoying to use. Will refine it a lot in the next devlog!

Editor now has proper labels!! Idk why it took me so long to do ts I was kinda stupid the entire time 💔

Very boring devlog I knowww I swear I’ll make cooler ones soon!! especially once I continue making songs and start mapping!!

Back to making OST!

I spent a LOT more than 1 and a half hours on this fyi I just didn’t track any of it because I feel kinda constrained when I use lapse

ONE HUNDRED HOURS!!!

New Features:

• Changing the editor scale changes the size of the events

Bug Fixes:

• Pressing play while the cursor is close to an event is now handled correctly, and doesn’t make all events disappear
• Scaling of events in the editor lanes is now handled correctly
• Too little or too many lines spawn if BPM changes are present

OKAYOAKAY I had a MASSIVE issue with editor preview syncing. The time would NOT properly sync. When the cursor in the editor went over something, it would take like 2-30 seconds to show up in the actual preview??? (it was SO weird) BUT I FINALLY FIXED IT by force syncing the preview when it’s in the editor. THIS TOOK SO LONGGG UGHGHGH

Now for the main change, CAMERA ZOOOMMMMM and rotation!! It’s near the end of the video <3

VISUALIZERRRR CHANGESSS

Major Changes:

• Added the ability to smoothen the curve or keep it jagged
• Added the ability to get rid of the bars/curve separately
• All implemented in editor!! ^^

Minor Changes:

• Added more smoothing to the bars
• Added smoothing when visualizer appears (it just snapped instantly before)

Fixes:

• Audio should normalize automatically (thanks Godot!), values fine-tuned to make visualizer look nicer

I’m so done with this 😭 it looks nice enough right?

BIG visualizer changes!! It looks so cool now! The math for everything is so annoying and tedious istg it took me so 💔

Added some changes to the preview too, it now hides the player and blocks movement so keybinds don’t overlap!

• a bug fix or two here and there

• Add an offset system so that the mapper doesn’t have to manually add audio offsets in audacity every time (CHROMAPPER PLEASE FIX THIS)

• Added a click sound that only happens when the game is played through the editor for timing purposes!

• Tweaked the editor preview logic to properly order events/reset upon pausing/playing!

Making changes in the editor now reflects the preview! Speed and length changes now accurately pass on to the editor instead of just printing “hi I changed” and not actually changing 💔

editor is technically fully functional now!! <3

Editor preview kinda works now! It’s a little finicky but tbh all rhythm game editors are kinda finicky 😭

With this I’m super close to finishing the editor! It’s technically fully functional, I just need some quality of life features so I don’t go crazy mapping 7 minute long songs <3

Added support to view the laser sweep event in the editor! Also added a feature to it that lets you go in either direction (not sure why that wasn’t already there)

Rotation is supported but I think I forgot to demo it in the video

Better input methods for most editor events! (everything isn’t a textbox anymore)

All I need to do now is make a better event editor for the laser slam, spread, and sweep!

(…and copy pasting… 🥀)

BPM CHANGES RAHHHHHHHHHH

Editor now supports BPM changes fully with NO bugs and the game supports it too (note how everything just speeds up a LOT)

Lowk was not that hard (thank you godot docs)

WHY DO I KEEP FINDING SO MANY FATAL BUGS ASJKGFJSKDFGKJAHSdGFJHSdGFJKHSd

Apparently with Vector2’s I have to sanitize the save file by converting it to an array and back or else it won’t load properly. Took me SO long to figure that out, but now all data types save!

BPM, artist, name, and sub name can now be modified and save/load as expected!

PLEASE no more bugs godot

I had a billion bugs with loading an ogg stream from a file. the error turned out to be related to the function which copied the ogg over to the map directory. it corrupted the ogg 💔 fixed that! and image loading works. selecting an image or ogg auto-moves it to the song dir. also added gui so the mapper can see whether something was successfully loaded or not.

I should prolly have a little more error handling just in case 😭

EUASYEAUS YOU CAN NOW SAVE AND LOAD MAPS!!

Added a system to save maps to a directory, and load maps. When a map dir is chosen, and a song file is chosen, it will be automatically copied to the song dir (chromapper core :3)

Not recording it because my files/filenames contain PII that I’d rather not leak! Just trust me on this!

Event deletion now actually deletes it from the map (so it doesn’t appear upon regenerating events) and changing event data sends it to the main script so that the map can be changed! (no way to demo it rn)

Ts is SUCH a boring series of devlogs I swear they’ll get more fun when I finish the editor 😭

Colour picker can now multi select for events that support it!

Basic deletion logic made. It doesn’t actually remove it from the map yet, so upon placing an event, it regenerates the deleted events 😭 Will fix that soon

Bug fixes!! I love fixing bugs!!

Fixed a bug breaking stacked events on events generated from file (float/int mismatch was grouping it into “4” and “4.0”)

Fixed lines not showing!

• like 50 other tiny bugs involving mouse passthrough and wtvwtv im a godot ui master now

fixed the event spawning logic so that it actually spawns where the player clicked and snaps to the nearest beat!

logic for new events is SO annoying istg

got a very borked system to make new events. I need to polish so much + fix an issue involving me not being able to place any event under x=1920. but hey im getting somewhere!

Redid the system to rely on absolute positioning instead of hboxes with spacing. The events are actually synced up now! Additionally, I added a way to change the scale of the lines (with error handling!)

SIIIIIXXX SEEEVEEENNN HOUUUURSSSSSSSS

Editor events are now coloured by the event’s colour, and the circle preview logic is MUCH better

Editor now previews laser circles and lets you modify it easier!

Preview when picking laser params! Next I’m gna try and add this for circles and sweeps so it can be properly visualized!

working on adding actual methods to enter data so that the mapper doesn’t have to manually type in everything 😭

Currently:

• Basic position/rotation system
• Colour picker
• Speed will evaluate fractions like (e.g. 1/4, 3/4, 1/3, etc)

I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH I HATE GODOT UI FLAGS SO MUCH

I needed a system to handle multiple events on the same track & beat, so I decided to make it so that they collapse into one, with extra showing up upon hover. I tried SO many methods and none of it worked. NOTHING was working until I decided to try and use popup windows and it did work decently well! I’m so dead from doing this I never want to touch UI ever again.

Also made it show the song length & # of events. And made each field editable (although it doesn’t save yet)

Editor can now take an array of events and sort them into their respective tracks with the correct spacing! Clicking on each event creates a popup window that shows all the data the event has. Nothing can be edited yet though.

ohhh boy here comes the editor 💔 I do NOT want to make ts but ig I have to

made very basic ui! tracks are auto generated from the global.events dictionary.

waowow dash go stretchy!!

• added some motion blur/better stretch to the dash animation
• better particles for the laser slam
• fixed a bug that made all visualizer bars start maxed out and reversed (flashbang)
• minor modifications to laser positioning

Working on adding a FAT laser now!
Works great for big hits in songs (like the one in the video)

I need to fine tune the particles because they look kiiinda mid (they still look much better in game then in the compressed 2 fps obs recording)

Had a big bug where it would NOT move no matter how hard I yelled at it. The issue ended up being its absence in a dict that told the script what could be moved and what couldn’t be moved 😭

Added a REALLY cool looking glitch effect and a laser spread! There isn’t much gameplay involved with the spread but it looks super cool! Also experimented with different combinations of events to see how they’d look together!

Major Changes:

• Glitch effect
• Laser spread preset
  Minor Changes:
• Changed visualizer logic to use delta time
• Turning the visualizer off makes it fall down instead of snapping to zero
  To Do:
• Adding one colour to a sweep event just makes it crash 💔 I gotta fix ts

waow! chromatic aberration!

added ca as an effect. I had a big issue with the intensity not working and it maxing out at like 0.1 or smth 😭 but I realized it was bc there was a piece of code constantly trying to pull it back to zero (CHEMICAL EQUILIBRIUM REFERENCE) so I had to fix that. Also made some improvements to the colours (some were WAYY too bright) I will prolly continue fine tuning the colours as time goes on.

ugh writing lyrics is SO hard butttt it’s sorta working out!
transition between first and second section, and a rly nice lead synth for the second section. im still working out lyrics/melody for the second section so i didn’t record that yet (it sounds super bad rn) will prolly finish that next devlog!

All my time since the last devlog has been spent trying out new things, trying to write lyrics, and trying to settle on a song idea. I prolly resetted like 4 timelapses 💔

But I’m finally getting going! Using Tsurumaki Maki Lite w/ synthv and vital for all the synth stuff.

Working on an UTAU song! The first section in the video is supposed to have lyrics (but it obv doesnt) I will add those in later!

Started working on a new song for the OST! It’s kiinda boring rn but I’ve barely spent any time on it yet 😭

CRT effect is now customizable
Some colours/glow were fixed bc they looked weird/too bright
Cleaned up some old code!

Added a crt effect! (not that visible in the low quality recording but it’s very much there)

Added the ability to turn off the visualizer and make the platform go invisible!

Modified some visualizer logic.

Other small changes!

Much better pulse (chromatic aberration! <3) and some other tweaks

Biiiig bugs here

When using the laser circle and laser sweep presets, the beat at which the laser spawned would begin to drift very fast. This wasn’t that noticeable on very fast settings, but setting it to something like 1/2 beat would make it horribly off beat. It got to the point where it would spawn an entire BEAT after it’s expected spawn time. I started by adding an epsilon to the bpm and forcing it to be a float, and while that did help it, by no means did it fix it. It was still extremely inconsistent. I ended up rewriting the fire logic completely for the two presets so that it uses a system similar to the one found in the main event handler. It was SUCH a hassle to fix but I finally got it done! The lasers you see after the drop in the video are all part of a single circle event, it’s clear the fire beats do not drift anymore (i have print statements to prove that too!). All considered it was a nice adventure learning about precision timing systems and floating point error. Lots learned! I also added a camera pulse feature, still in the works since it looks kiiinda mid rn.

tl;dr: timing! and camera pulse!

AUDIO VISUALIZERR this took me SO long to get working. the math to make it look good and even sort of sync to the music was so annoying 😭 i revised my code like a billion times and changed a billion values BUT IT WORKEDD

fog now has a slight tint

sun isnt bright but still looks glowy, and now has a (really mid) enter/leave animation!

Currently working on adding a synthwave sun to the background! It looks fire but with some BIG issues rn.

1. It’s so hard to see anything in front of the sun.
2. The transition looks horrible
3. The colour matches the platform, but switches INSTANTLY instead of easing in.

This has turned out to be so much harder than I thought it would be. Looks mid rn but I’ll lock in!

Added a full system that lets the user pick from a list of colours and applies it to any event. For lasers, that’s just a single colour, but for sweeps and circles you can give it a list of colours through which it’ll alternate! You can also change the main platform’s colour, which conflicted with my logic of instantiating a scene for every event. I spent SO long trying to fix that and nesting everything within an if statement to double check if it’s actually spawnable fixed it! I also had issues with timing the events, as the prefire for the second sweep always went off too late, but the actual firing was on-time. The issue ended up being that I was sorting the events in order of fire beat, not spawn beat. So the platform colour change (prefire time of zero) spawned after the sweep (prefire time of 0.8s) even though it was on a lower beat. I updated the sort system to sort by prefire beat and that fixed it! The platform colour change gave me SO many issues.

tldr: PRETTY COLOURS!

Added a new sweep event! It’s a modifiable preset for laser movement that sweeps it across the screen. Currently, it works for vertical lasers sweeping horizontally. I’m trying to get it to work with other rotations too (vertically and diagonally) but that doesn’t work right now.

Laser Circles can now modify themselves with input from the map file!

Fog exists now, adds some nice depth and makes it feel less bland!

SPINNING LASERSS

The math for this took SO long but it finally worked!! and it looks SICK

Proper triggering system that can handle multiple events!

I optimized the way it detects so it doesn’t for loop through the entire map file EVERY FRAME…

Right now it’s a 10x5 grid, but that will prolly change. Some rotations and positions don’t properly work for some reason. Like diagonals look weird no matter where they are. I’ll look into that!

Made a basic firing system for a laser event. It starts the pre-emptive warning 0.8s before the fire beat, so it stays consistent across diff BPMs. I had to fix an issue where it would be really off time and slow, but that’s all fixed now! The current system is more of a demo (very hardcoded) so I’ll prolly end up rewriting most of it, but I got the basis down!

Made a logo!
& Modified some movement stuff, camera movement, and added more player squishing.

Started working on the actual game! Got some good bloom/styling down, basic particles, a basic laser, and movement!

Worked on the second drop of the song and the transition! Polished a lot of stuff and balanced audio levels a lil. It’s still VERY choppy and unfinished, there’s tons of bugs that I have to fix but I’m almost done!

First devlog! Woohoo!!

In Godot:
Made the project, player scene, and basic physics.

In Garageband:
The VAST majority of the time here was spent working on the second song! I made the intro section, pre drop 1, buildup, drop, transition to pre-drop 2, and the buildup to drop 2! I kinda want to add voicelines (The Master styled) but I have no idea how I’m supposed to pull that off 😭

Enjoy ts little snippet of the song!