Welcome, drifters! This past month was full of reorganization within project management, and I’m now even more excited at the scope that Drifter Dynasty will aim to tackle. With this in mind, I have removed Alpha Demo #3 from the itch.io page. I will not upload a new demo until the first vertical slice is complete. You can think of that as the first segment of gameplay that demonstrates what a polished and complete, within the current budget, experience can look like.

Worry not though, for I will continue to deliver monthly dev blog posts! As of this post, there will no longer be a set time for them to be published on the 15th of each month. Twitter posts will be sparser as I aim to showcase more substantial milestones for features and tools. For the time being, Instagram posts have come to a halt, but they will resume sometime next year. All of this is to return more time back to actually creating the video game.

Aside from all of that decision-making, I spent most of the month working on and polishing the SFX Testing Suite. Below, you can see the basic workflow of testing a single SFX on a single animation.

Default appearance.

Loading a scene to apply SFX.

Choosing an animation.

Cross punch animation loaded.

Loading an SFX.

Loaded a punch SFX.

Setting the time stamp for the SFX.

Final test.

The temporary punch SFX you see in these images is provided with the attribution instructions of: “Punch by Iwan ‘qubodup’ Gabovitch http://opengameart.org/users/qubodup”. You can download the SFX here.

I also implemented saving and loading, which you can see in action below! I went the extra mile with this tool, so adding new features is not an issue because of the robust design. You can expect to see more widgets for different types of scenes in the coming months.

https://twitter.com/eric_sonofafish/status/1449232120359047171

My current preoccupation with tools development is not over yet. With the knowledge gained from working on the SFX Testing Suite, I plan to revisit the Animator and Tilemap Editor! I’ll be able to show both of them next month, so stay tuned for more nifty upgrades. That’s all for today though. Until next time, stay well and drift on!