Progress Report: September

Hello everyone!

Here is another progress report about “The Gate”, my current project that is eating all my time 😄.

First of all, I’d like to thank all my followers and supporters who are greatly helping me, both morally and financially, to continue this project ❤️.

I’d also like to thank everyone who tried the demo I released at the end of August (available here for those who haven’t tried it yet).

Thanks for your comments, suggestions, and especially bug reports, which I immediately fixed.

I have to be honest: I was very surprised by all the positive comments I read, I can feel positive vibes surrounding “The Gate”.

I read some great comments about the graphics, story, and overall atmosphere, and this gave me an extra push to complete the game as quickly as possible while still maintaining the highest possible quality.

I was also honored to receive the attention of AmigaBill, who showed off “The Gate” in his videos; IndieRetroNews, who published an article about my game; and the blog Beyond Nostalgia, who published a wonderful article about the demo with some photos taken from his CRT monitor, which I really appeciated!

Saberman has recorded and published a video of the demo on YouTube, thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB_inyBQ7gg

And a huge thank you to everyone who talked about this project on social media and helped me to gain more visibility.

…but now it’s time to let you know how the development is going 🙂

WHAT HAPPENED LATELY?

I’m currently working on room 17, there are 47 in total (‼️), but unfortunately I was slowed down by that horrible beast called COVID which stopped me for about 10 days!

BUG FIXED THANKS TO USERS REPORTS

Luckily there haven’t been many bug reports, and that’s quite comforting because it means the core of the game is running fine 😀.

• The first bug reported was about pressing the 0 key (instead of 1 or 2) in the Kal’s terminal: the game was crashing because any wrong option selected was not handled.
  I fixed it thanks to Thomas S. who has reported the issue.
  This error was present in some more scripts that I promptly fixed.
• Thanks to Alper S. I’ve fixed a pretty bad bug that was causing partial saves (but only when the user was changing the save slot using the manual save).
  There was an error in the recursive function used to duplicate the source slot: it was only copying a part, that’s why entering some already visited rooms, the player was finding them like they was first time seen.
• Many users has reported the missing support for the Backspace to delete characters in the terminals, especially when typing the credentials: this could be potentially frustrating for the user so I added support for the Backspace, additionally any other not-printable character are now ignored (instead of printing a little square).
• I got another request: I heard something like this “terminals are nice and all but staring at the screen watching the print sequence is a bit tiring”.
  This is true: something like this could also discourage people to replay the game or, even worst, to stop playing it.
  So here is the fix: holding down the left or right mouse button during the terminal print process forces the terminal screen to be rendered at maximum speed.
  This feature is already present in the dialogue system.
• I got another report about some graphical glitches that was showed after exiting a terminal session: unfortunately I couldn’t reproduce this behaviour so I’m waiting for some more reports with more details to investigate the issue.

As you can see user feedback is important, really important!

Please continue to share your feedback and the hardware configuration you tried the game on!

ENGINE IMPROVEMENTS

• Since I needed some pretty wide animations I thought to add a vertical grab routine for the animations frames, before this change I could only grab horizontally placed frames.

  

• I worked to find a way (the simplest possbile) to add ambience sounds.
  The original idea was to use a dedicated memory bank with samples for the ambience sounds, but I ended up using modules.
  With modules I can use looping (and single shot) sound effects in specific tracks/channels and with a 2-3 patterns song I can easily implement this feature.

  At the same time, I can provide background music for rooms where I need to add more tension, like in boss fights.
  I think to use sampled music for this because of the few channels available.

• I created a new enemy’s brain script, a little more aggressive to make Kal’s life a bit harder in some rooms!
• I fixed a bug regarding the enemies: when entering again into a room with enemies, their positions were not restored.
• Another bug related to the enemies has shown his face in some occasional circumstances, it was tied to the enemies state saving routine: when in a room that were enemies defined, I was querying the enemies bob positions without checking if they were killed, if they where previously killed the code crashed (because the bob wasn’t defined).

SPECIFIC IMPROVEMENTS FOR TERMINALS

• Since I needed to run terminal animations and I needed to implement a countdown during the wait for the user input, I added a new command :
  [GETNBK=<varname>,<label-if-key-not-pressed>]
  (Non-Blocking key input).
  To let it work correctly I also added another command
  [CLRKEY] (Clear keyboard input buffer).
• I changed many commands so that now I’m able to use variables along with direct values in many script’s commands.
• I optimized several commands to increase the parser speed.
• I fixed a bug in the [IMG…] command, I introduced it during my optimizations.

SOME MISC STUFF

• In the engine (both in dialogue and terminal script) I added a special command to handle… special situations 😄

With this command I can trigger several events, both from terminal scripts and dialogue scripts.
I created this command so that the triggered event can be activated immediately (when the command is encountered in the script) or when the script ends.

Right now I used this command to end the game demo and to show a couple of pictures, but I already added support for many more actions like:

• Manage the background music (play, stop, pause, etc…)
• Play cut scenes (IFF animations for example)
• Show slideshows or single images

I think these features could add depth to the narration, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to add cut scenes and/or slideshows—it’s just a matter of time to create these media, the code is already there.

All the other work I did is related to the creation of graphics, sounds, animations and scripts for the rooms I’ve worked on.

TO DO LIST

My secret to-do list is very long, and I’ll keep it secret for now, I’m going to list here only the essential features that I will absolutely add to the game:

• Bullet holes in the walls.
  You may have noticed that Kal’s bullets leave an hole when they hit the walls.
  I want to restore this holes when the Kal’s enters again in that room.
  This feature is internally almost ready.
• Enemies sound effects
  • Short range attack
  • Long range attack
  • Die

  The code for the enemy sounds is completely missing, but I already planned how to implement it.

• When the map is loaded it should be centered on the player position without let it move from the leftmost side to him position: this behaviour is really bad because it reveals what’s in the room, especially when the player spawns on the rightmost side.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There’s not much else to add other than thanking everyone once again: I’ll do my best to make an enjoyable game!

Try the demo if you haven’t already!