Hey everyone! This week I wanted to talk a bit about the development choices I made while adding the braziers to the game.

Not so great start

For a while now I’ve had some lanterns in the game already, but I never truly liked the way they looked.

The biggest problem was that they stood out too much and made everything around them look very dark. Also they had no purpose to be there, gameplay-wise.

Small steps

The first thing I did was, that I redrew the sprites to them, so they would the theme, spooky magical temple, that the game is.

I added some simple particles, for which I could control the width and height in runtime, and they looked great. They still had no purpose, but it was a start.

Fire!

After creating the particles for the braziers, I had an idea to add some more obstacles to the game. I reused the same particles I used for the braziers and created fire!

To make them different from the spikes that kill you instantly, I added an ‘on fire’ status effect, represented by the player turning purple when walking into the fire, which would slowly kill the player, the effect would slowly reset, if the player walked out of the fire.

Boom! Explosions!

As I wanted the braziers to have a purpose in the gameplay, I made them, when touched by a player, fall down and explode into fires!

This adds one more trap, but the difference this and the others is that the player has full control of it and can use it against other players who might be behind them. I think it adds another cool mechanic to Greedy Bastards!

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading.

See you next Sunday!

-Ollie