Been hard at work the last few weeks! I’ve started to design the 4th level, and some passages will be underwater. Like Labyrinth of Galleria or Operancia, you will have limited oxygen to explore those areas. I’ve worked a full day on the transition from air to water, and it got some positive response online so I’m happy about this.

Underwater

To make this I started with this video on Caustic Shaders. With my implementation/Game, I still have some very shiny artifacts I’m not sure how to solve. Thanks to tjm on the Discord server for pointing me in the right direction for caustics. I did not know about them.

Then for the surface, I just reused the shader from time and tweaked the colors.

Finally, I applied some wavy distorsion shader on the screen from Godot shaders.

Finally, I worked on transitioning the music. Unfortunately, I was handling the music incorrectly. I had a setting that controlled volume and sound effects, that would send a signal, captured to every audio player in my game, and they would adjust their volume accordingly. However, I could just use Godot Audio Bus system! It was laying there all this time and I didn’t use it. A bit of refactoring and cleaning, and I adapted my game to use it to control sound. Then, making an underwater sound effect is trivial, you muffle the sounds with a filter and add some delay and it’s done!

Merchant

I recently added Gold drops in my game, both from monster loot and from chests. To use this gold, I am making a shop. I was dreading this feature because it’s all UI and it’s not my strong suit, but it went well. I could reuse a lot of code from the Inventory and they work the same, achieving at the same time, some unity across the game.

Level 3 is Done!

I’ve completed the design of level 3, with a boss fight. It’s functional, and I playtested it, but it still requires some polish here and there. Overall, I’m happy because this went much faster than the two first levels! I’m currently working on level 4.

Started designing level 4!

The map is done and I have to place all the doors, monsters, chests, and little props to make it live. The structure with the canal and the weather is very typical of the Netherlands don’t you think?