May 2024 Update - Boss fight, map and more

April ended up being a productive month! The game dev gods were on my side an things mostly went my way, not getting caught up on problems for very long and mostly just moving forward. Or maybe that's experience coming into play, I dunno.

I expected to spend the whole month of April wrapping up the game's first boss fight, but about halfway through the month I was ready to set it aside and move on. I feel pretty good about it and am interested to see how it plays for fresh eyes before jumping in and making tweaks or overhauls to it.

I then decided to start tackling a map, which for all I knew would have taken a whole month as well. But I had a basic version working after a few hours of work, and while it's still not done I was able to make some further refinements and it's very close to being fully functional (though very much not polished).

A little bit on the technical implementation of the map in Game Maker:

• There are "Map Zones" placed manually in the rooms.
• The zones check for collision and record the coordinates of the collision into a DS Grid (Game Maker's speedier version of a 2D array). The grid is 32x32.
• In the Cockpit room, I use the coordinates to draw the grid coordinates onto a tilemap. Each coordinate on the grid is 1 pixel, so the 32x32 grid is 32 pixels squared.
• I have the map off to the side from the main cockpit screen, but use a viewport to draw it in the middle of the screen and scale it up (the viewport is scaled).
• The background of the cockpit room is a grid, so blank spots on the map appear as an empty grid.
• For now, I'm manually placing points of interest onto the map somewhat blindly and testing. I may make this part of the Map Zone process as well in the future, automatically detecting things.

Aside from visual polish, I still need to add functionality to the map to allow the player to pan around the map and for the cursor to jump to different spawn points when selecting them in the menu. I don't currently plan to have a mini map during gameplay, as I don't want this to be a game where someone is constantly looking at a map when they play. It's more about plotting your route and then executing during gameplay. Though, like all things, this is subject to change as the game's design evolves and I get feedback from playtests.

I also made some tweaks to visuals, adding contrast to the interactive elements and removing contrast from backgrounds, and added some effects when the player encounters an “anomaly” (time freezing, XP granting object that never respawns). The background gets a flashing overlay and the foreground gets its contrast bumped up subtly.  

Oh, and I changed the title from Chrono Blazer to... Chronoblazer.