28Apr - 4May Game Trailer/ Settings/ Final ending added

Progress
Things are almost complete now. The game is nearing its final phase. All that is left is music, sounds as well as polishing the graphics and levels a bit more.

I incorporated a fourth unlock-able ending into the game, and added Cheats to the game which can be unlocked after completing the entire game. "Completing" here basically means having seen and been through every thing in the game + completed all achievements and not just by completing all levels.

I'm happy with how the game is right now, and I was told that I should be happy because the game is really almost complete now.

The game at the end of this week is currently at 64 levels, 1 main ending and 3 secret unlockable endings and one "Game Complete" ending, which isn't an ending, but something to let the player know that he/she has truly completed the game.

It is safe to say that I am finally seeing the light at the end of this long and arduous tunnel.

Game Trailer
I was very against the idea of making a game trailer as I felt that it was something unnecessary and time consuming. But now, there is a need for it, and since I have some spare time, I decided to make one. I have written a number of things and events that happen sequentially that I want to be seen in the trailer.

On 1 May, I completed the trailer! It took me one day to get all the necessary gameplay footage and complete the trailer. But it took me another 2 days (multitasking this and other stuff) to actually touch up on the final trailer. All that is left is music for the trailer.

Settings for Music and Sounds
Apparently, Flixel's mute does not separate music and sounds. I was going in circles thinking of an efficient way to separate them, but the game just keeps crashing no matter what I try.

In the end, the solution was rather simple, though it took me days to figure it out/do it. I just created a group to store all the sounds I use, and adjust the volumes of all sounds in the group.

Li Hao gave me more work too. He said that when a music is muted, it should not pause or stop, but continue playing, so that when the music is resumed, it doesn't start from the beginning and reset the mood. I felt that was a fantastic thought. I finally completed coding them today. This was tougher than I thought, and I spent too much time on this.

Recreating level 1?
Currently, the level 1 in my game (and some of the earlier levels) are pretty pointless.
I am thinking of redoing them. I have an idea, but it doesn't really flow well with the rest of the levels. It's pretty hard to improve current levels too.

Issue with Level Editor feature
Apparently, I was reading up on how the Local SharedObject works. It seems it cannot store complex data types, like my LevelData class. My level editor cannot save levels because I use the LevelData class to save custom levels created in the editor. This means I have to use arrays. I had nightmares coding arrays in the editor feature.

So to solve the issue, I have an array which represents my old LevelData, of arrays such as the player's positions, enemies' positions, one of which is an array of keys, of an array of blocks' coordinates.

So to speak, I now use an array, of arrays, of arrays, of arrays to store a coordinate, of a block, of a key, of a LevelData. Sweet array-ception!

It could go one more level deeper, by creating an Array of 5 LevelDataArrays, as there are 5 save slots given to the player to create their own custom levels. So instead of using 5 arrays, I use a single Array of 5 arrays. Buuuut, I don't want to fry my weak brain any more than I should.

Thankfully, this issue was extremely easy to fix.

New 'Cutscene' Graphics
I was getting a little bored, since I have to wait for the music. So I revisited two particular cutscenes which are simply not up to par with the other graphics I drew for the game. I drew these in Paint, a year ago, and reused them for this game.

Then, I redrew them in 1800 x 1800 px resolution, and scaled them down to fit the game window:

 

Even though the tree, city backdrop and the bench were reused assets, it still took me longer than I wanted, because it was fun doing it and I wanted to make the scenes look good. The day picture received a different colour scheme because the original picture makes the scene look too warm (though it was meant for a sunset originally). The night picture is my favourite no doubt.

They certainly look much better than I initially expected. I wanted them to be a small picture initially, but I saved it as 480 x 480 in the end since there was enough detail to call for a bigger picture size.

Though I have already designed a game logo, I considered using the day scenery for a game logo.


Minor changes
Level 54 has some interesting text
Added checkpoints to the Level Selection screen
Added a hidden 5th cheat.
Auto-pause re-enabled.