I feel like I was pretty good about hitting my mark last week, so this week I’m gonna bite off way more than I can chew.

Despite doing some prefab work on stream, I still have a lot left to do, especially after updating the level generation algorithm and radically affecting the frequency of certain configurations. So I’ll be doing more of that, and I’ll also be trying to knock out any issues that are preventing prefabs from being shippable. This includes shading background tiles correctly behind destructible terrain, adding spawn opportunities for hanging and flying enemies, and decoupling spawn points for chests and for NPCs.

I’d like to take a stab at getting a new sort of item pickup implemented in the game. These will spawn from treasure chests and will apply permanent bonuses a la The Binding of Isaac. This will necessitate a few complementary features that I don’t have yet, including non-modal popup dialog boxes that don’t interrupt gameplay, for displaying item names and descriptions. I’ll also need to start figuring out the set of upgradable stats as well as any other non-numerical upgrades I might want to support. (Things like damage types would fall under that umbrella, although I don’t anticipate adding different damage types to this game.)

As I mentioned in Tuesday’s video, it’s going to be a crunchy five months and change to ship Gunmetal Arcadia by early February, and it’s going to be a strange crunch beyond that because I’m not really able to devote long hours to this project anymore. But then, I built the entire world of Super Win the Game in about three and a half months on top of ongoing engine work, feature additions, and public demos, so this isn’t totally outside my wheelhouse.

As I’m writing these “here’s what I’ll be working on this week” blogs several days in advance of posting them, I have a little bit of foresight into how accurate my predictions were. This time, I ended up going off on an unexpected tangent and implementing UI for what I’m branding as the “legacy” system, a concept that dates back to the very beginning of this project, in which each session is informed in immediate and clearly defined ways by the previous. Here’s what that looks like in practice: