I've been doing some thinking about what to do today, even considering my testing session of last night.
It's a good time to write down some notes:
it's sometimes hard to understand what's going on with portals, because of the lack of visual and audio feedback
there's still a bug in the target platform selection, when trying to go backwards
the power-up pickup logic needs to be completed (the pick-up should happen only if you are looking towards the power-up, and only if you are on the same platform as the power-up)
I need to at least add some audio to let the player know that an enemy is approaching from behind
the player can destroy enemies, but the enemies can't damage the player. And the player should have at any moment an indicator of their health level, and an indicator that they're receiving damage
I want to add a ranged attack, probably with a cooldown or a "charging" mechanism so that it still makes sense to also do close range combat
the regularity of the platform grid makes it boring (and makes it hard to understand when you are teleporting: the different shade of grey is definitely not enough)
the player starts in a corner and the enemies are spawned on random platforms - we can do better than that
I need to start working on the "particular" visualization I have in mind, what I'm doing now is just a debug view (and I need to implement a convenient switch between the two)
Where to start? In the spirit of prototyping, I'm going in "breadth first" and not "depth first": I prefer to sketch new things and not polish/iterate, unless it's gameplay breaking (as in the case of the target platform selection).
So, I decided that today I'm going to add in some placeholder sounds.
This will hopefully help with making the player aware of their surroundings (enemies approaching from behind) and will also provide some useful interaction feedback.
Let's make a list of the sounds that should be more useful.
enemy spawn
enemy destruction
enemy receives hit
enemy is alive (loop)
portal opening
portal closure
portal open (loop)
player losing health
As we discussed, the part of the combat system related to the player health is still missing, and that might very well be the next thing we're going to do. Can't hurt to have a sound ready for that interaction.
I started adding what is probably the most important sound at this stage: an "alive enemy" sound that can help localizing enemies around you when playing.
As the sound spatialisation was crucial, this was the right moment to integrate the Meta XR Audio SDK.
I followed the documentation, and after a short while I had a spatialised test sound attached to the enemy sphere.
I also added an environmental background noise ("attic air conditioning and vents") taken from the "Oculus ambisonic audio pack", just to make the game audio less flat.
For the "real" game, I plan to hire at least a couple of freelancers (a sound designer/musician and a 3d/vfx artist), but for now, this is a 100% solo project. So I started looking for some sound effects suitable for the events I described in the list.
I managed to find a few good ones from free sound libraries I have saved throughout the years, and for some others (the portal ones) I decided that it was quicker to generate them with a tool I bought I while ago (Tsugi DSP Sci-fi). After a bit of fiddling with Audacity, to cut a single sound generated by the tool into three (open/loop/close), I got to a point where everything sounds "good enough" for the prototype.
To make testing less boring, I also implemented a super-simple "enemies waves" system that every time you complete a wave, more (and faster) enemies are spawned.
This resulted in the dramatic ending of the following video.
And that's it for today!
I think that tomorrow I'll finally add the handling of player health, making it possible to actually lose the game.
That will also require visual and audio feedback: plenty of work to be done.