Devlog 9 - Electron can be annoying at times

Devlog 9 

Well its time to submit for a lot of people as the deadline is getting very close now. Anyway today I managed to:

• Create a whole new AI pathfinding system
• Optimise lighting by changing one value
• Add an icon
• Create the game page
• Run out of automatic exports through GDevelop, so had to use Electron itself to make the exports
• Fix a few bugs / make the game more balanced

So the first thing on my mind was changing the AI. It was awful, slow and just generally really not good so I decided to create a new room based AI that would first path find to the room the player was in, then start to chase the player. This was a lot simpler then I thought it would be and didn't take me long to fix a few initial bugs. After that I noticed the frame rate was really low so I decided to take a look at the debugger which told me the post events, which were effects, were causing the low frame rates. After lowing the Player's light source radius to a tenth, frame rate was really smooth so I increased it partially and it now works really smooth while looking a bit better.

Next I decided to export the game as an update so I told GDevelop to export it. I then realised I should've added an icon so I quickly used the heart sprite as the icon and started exporting a second time which meant I had used all of my automatic exports because GDevelop only lets non subscribers automatically export twice a day which normally isn't a big day, unless your doing a lot of updates for a jam submission. Anyway I uploaded the newer build to itch and I immediately realised two issues. First reloading was broken, you could reload no matter how many bullets you had, so you would have negative bullets. Additionally you could run out of bullets quite quick early on, so I quickly made a fix for the reloading and added a cheap way of buying bullets for the starting gun while increasing its starting ammo and it should now work really well. Key word, should.

I say should because I tried to export again and anyone who has paid attention to what I've said knows I've ran out of exports. So I had to start messing around with Electron. After failing to work out how to use Fiddle to export to multiple operating systems, I installed Electron Forge, a command based version of Electron. I then realised I couldn't export to MacOS with it and Linux just caused a connection error and the Windows builds wouldn't open so all I have now is a html build because although I have a few hours to get these other builds working, I don't think there's enough people who would prefer those builds to warrant me making those builds. So I decided to stick with just a html build.

Then I decided after adding this build to itch.io to write this devlog. A bit after I decided to test my game again and I realised the player couldn't die. So to fix this, I changed the condition checking for player HP so it doesn't check for width but for height because although the outline is at a 90 degree angle, the actual HP sprite isn't. A lack of consistency can make things harder / not work,

Thanks for reading and if you've submitted a game, good luck!