Kit's Blog

The good news is, I received my second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination yesterday. The bad news is I have been aching all day as a side effect and have been barely able to get out of bed. This will unfortunately mean that the Alpha 0.4 update will be delayed to mid-August, and will likely be the final major update for a while as I am starting school soon after. I will continue to work on smaller updates for Cambria during the school year, but development will slow down significantly. The new assets will also undergo a lot of changes before the update releases, as I would like to build a concrete art style for Cambria.

Yesterday I redid most of Cambria's assets (picture below). I wasn't satisfied with the source photography I had taken and edited for most of the textures so I remade them in pixel art. I also slightly modified the player and medic spritesheets so that their eyes are a bit larger. Tonight I've been working on health bars for the rovers to further telegraph the damage that the player does to them. Other smaller things I've done since my last post here include: adding knockback to when a rover is hit, making damage from both the player and the rovers a random integer between 10 and 25 rather than a fixed value, and some general game balance. I've done all this as a means of procrastination. Whenever I have a big complicated feature I need to implement, I tend to add a bunch of other smaller things to the game. This is actually kind of a good thing as I can iron out the little details at times where I otherwise would not have thought to. It's also a bad thing, of c

I wiped out while biking today, causing a glazed elbow, a scratched leg, a sore hip, and a busted thumb. That didn't stop me from making progress on Cambria, though. With the help of my colleague, I was able to get a start on the actual town of Cambria itself as well as improve the melee combat introduced in the last update. The aforementioned combat still needs work, but it's already a lot better. I'll be revamping the chaotic medic NPC to something a lot more calm and collected than the little fiend you see running around level 4. I'm considering building a navmesh and time-based schedule for the medic similar to what you see in Stardew Valley, but that may prove to be very difficult.  The update will release once I've completed the first draft of the town and its people, polished up the combat, and added what I like to call tileswitch blocks. It's a simple feature, but it can go a long way. These are tiles that start off as one thing (for example, a block) an

 You can download Cambria Alpha 0.3, the Melee Update, on my GitHub page right now! Just press the "Download" button on the right of the page, extract the zip file, and double click the cambria.py file. If you're using Linux, you can navigate to cambria.py's directory and type "python3 cambria.py" in the terminal. CHANGELOG: -Added the shovel weapon -Added player HP -Added the medic NPC -Removed the Danger Room -Updated the first two levels -Added overworld music and three new sound effects -Added splash texts

That's right! Alpha 0.3 is going to be released 4 days earlier than intended! This is because I vastly overestimated how long it would take to complete. It will be released tomorrow, July 17th, 2021. The source code will be on my GitHub and it will also be released as linux and windows executables.

Development on Alpha 03 is going smoothly! I've implemented an HP system so that the player doesn't die instantly when they collide with a rover. However, the damage wasn't telegraphed well, so the player wouldn't know they took damage unless they were looking at their HP. To fix this, I added a damage sound effect and animation. I'm currently working on implementing combat, which has proven to be somewhat difficult. There will be a brief hiatus on development of Cambria as I will be on vacation for a couple of days. Development should resume on the 12th or 13th of July. Alpha 03 will have a tentative release date of July 20th, but as a worst case scenario it may be pushed back up until July 31st, although I highly doubt that will be necessary.

It's finally here! Oh, and happy Independence Day to all those that celebrate it. CHANGELOG: -Added a map loading system which allows for the creation of new rooms for the player to explore -Added the Ruins Level which is slightly more complex in structure than the first level -Added the Danger Room, which is almost entirely pseudorandomly generated. It's best to just take a quick peek and then get out of there as fast as you can.

With this post, I joyfully announce that the development hiatus was unnecessary, as we have overcome our main development obstacle. New tilemaps are now able to be loaded into the game. The only problem is, the player is loaded in at a fixed position in each tilemap. The problem with this, is that if a player is spawned in on the left, goes to the exit on the right, loads into the new map, and then goes back to the initial map, the player will once again appear on the left side of the map, rather than in front of the right exit. I will need to figure out some way to load the player independently of loading the tilemap. After that, Alpha 0.2 will officially be released. If you look closely at the code of Alpha 0.2 when it is released, you may see snippets of features that are to be implemented in 0.3! I'm hoping to get Alpha 0.2 out by the 10th, but I can't promise anything.

I call this one the Sound Update. If you look at the Changelog you'll see why. I wasn't able to finish and implement the level loading system, so Alpha 0.2 has been delayed. Speaking of Alpha 0.2, the update is actually delayed indefinitely as Cambria's development is now on hiatus. I will keep this blog updated on when development will resume. It will likely be some time before the end of July. Happy Canada Day, folks! Link:  https://github.com/kecenr/cambria_alpha_indevbuild_0.1.5