Cometfall v2.0

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Inspiration

I made the Cometfall world for the previous contest, inspired by old-school RPGs. It's definitely fun to dig back into the systems and see how they could be re-written to support upgrade paths and expansions.

What it does

I added new "store" UIs for the player to purchase various upgrades and spawn new challenges (higher-tier, more difficult monsters) once player have purchased a few upgrades and defeated the standard monsters. New daily streaks and growing rewards provide additional incentives to return regularly. Additionally, a new monster portrait gallery now adorns the player's house and upgrades itself as players defeat more and higher-tier monsters.

How we built it

I had to refactor a ton of the existing code to support much better extensibility, adding saveable player stats, monster levels, spell levels. There's a fair bit more typescript in v2 than in v1, but at least it's much better organized. I also updated a lot of the art assets to optimize them and include levels of detail where it made sense, reducing the geometry density of the world by about 1/3.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the unreliability I faced in v1 regarding reading persistent variables of json type, and how important saving all of the player state is to this game, I re-engineered the persistent system to save state across multiple number variables, with plenty of bit packing for efficiency. I added an import path for v1 saved state to migrate to the v2 format, and also some checksum validation to make sure I had everything reloading correctly every time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I like the new custom UI results I was able to achieve in this second revision. Especially the Grimoire, the book used by players to upgrade their spells. It looks very nice and clean. Also, to make the game a little easier, I now slow down time for monsters and enemy spells when the inventory is open (making it easier to switch weapons without being hit). That worked so well that I extended it to slow a lot more of the world, and also adding this effect to the upgraded version of the teleport spell.

What we learned

There are some new tricks I started using in v2 I didn't have the opportunity to dig into in v1. Levels of detail, being one. I also rewrote my procedural animation system into something much more scalable and reusable, which was vital since monsters have quite a bit of animation to this, and some to the world as well. I feel better set for the future.

What's next for Cometfall v2.0

I of course already have a to-do list for v3, obviously! Adding support for more weapons, more spells, more upgrades. Also, armor will be a nice addition. Planning on some day-specific events as well, to encourage players to return regularly.