Some additional improvements were made to the keep following people’s feedback and ideas on my head.
Day 2, July 20th
First off, some cleanup was required… I fixed an issue reported in my first YouTube video, where the images were not being loaded on Firefox. I also noticed the Pause screen wasn’t triggering due to manual changes I had made to the UI.
I also added a special state for newborn Gaby in 2017, and did some changes to load the data for years summaries and collaborators from JSON files instead of using scrapped data from the website. Alongside, I added some metadata for the collaborators and used it to better align their portraits when they were being displayed as characters on the keep.
Finally, something that was missing and was worth at least doing an initial version of: audio. I have some ideas to improve it, maybe spatial audio per project, or a theme per year? but for now I added some procedural ambience and simple sound effects for warping and walking steps.
Day 3, July 22nd
I detected a big issue with loading the resources in my shared hosting: long story short is, the keep is deployed at https://slashie.net/keep, and it loaded resources from both https://slashie.net/data and https://slashie.net/img, and since both are “outside” the web subdirectory, repeated requests triggered some spambot countermeasures put in place. After some approaches, I went for the simplest one which was adding symbolic links Apache can follow, meaning the resources are now self contained from the perspective of the proxy layer.
Now for the NPCs, I added a small conversation blurb when talking with a them, including the list of projects worked with for that specific year, and a greeting based on their description. Also tried to reduce the chance of them clipping walls by changing their collision checks, and made them move their legs in addition to their arms while waking.
I added Jump command, just because you Must Have Jump always.
Fixed a problem in mobile where interaction with the orb was firing a double event thus taking you to a random year.
Day 4, July 23
Made it so that project related links would attempt to open in a popup if possible, in order to keep navigation within the site (at least to read the blog archives). This is especially useful when running in full screen mode, to avoid major interruptions in the UX.
Day 5, July 26
Someone (?) told me it would be great to have the frames hanging be portals ala Mario 64 (or was it just me?). I went ahead to implement this which serves many purposes: the keep feels more like a magical place, less cramped with info, and with more space in case I want to present more info per project.
This included some camera changes too, so that you could see your character jumping into the portals and emerging on the other side a ripple effect when going through it.
Right now the rooms themselves feel pretty empty… will need more data per project to fill them up… initially at least I’m considering adding the 3D model of Miku made by Alcaraz for our Magical Mirai project, to addorn that room.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 