Week 9 - Calm Before the Storm


Hello, and welcome to yet another devlog for Soluna's Secret.

Firstly, I must apologise for not being available last week, as this series of updates relies heavily on screenshots. It helps a lot to show progress, rather than just telling you about it blindly, you see. There was no way of getting any I successfully re-installed all 50GB of Visual Studio and Unity. Perhaps it would have been better to work on the game and try to better describe my changes through words alone, but that's beside the point.

Turns out there's an uncommon bug I found where both Unity and Visual Studio can go uncoordinated, meaning that I must flail around in one before the other notices anything's changed. Speaking of changes, there's been quite a few of those, but most of them are minor. I can practically feel the outward pressure mounting, but I am determined to finish this darned thing regardless.

Remember when I said last week that I would be experimenting with text? Those experiments were short lived. It fell down my list of priorities when I realised that Soluna's Secret is currently a puzzle game without any puzzles. This next feature would be the key step in fixing that:


Now those might look like levers to you, but if my design holds up, these should be reusable for all kinds of things. For now, here’s a quick demonstration:

   

Now isn’t that neat? This system is based almost entirely on a list of composite objects, so I can expand that list and complicate the puzzle solution during gameplay. Due to the generic nature of the classes driving it all, it doesn’t have to be levers, either. Pressure plates, hidden switches and other objects hidden behind the lantern’s light can all be triggers to make doors like that one open. This might not sound like A-material on paper, but stick with it. It’ll look more impressive in time.

Oh yes. I should probably mention that my game is still filled to the brim with placeholder assets. Cubes, cylinders, the works. I’ve been hard at work fixing that issue as well:

This lack of assets is the key thing holding back level design right now, and should be fixed up soon.

Until next time…

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