October update: Secrets and speedups

It's been a year, huh? I mean, it feels like a year, to be honest. Bloody hell, 2024 has been a fair bit insane if I'm honest, but hey, still here, still coding. 

I've been adding in a couple of secret rooms (not so secret now, I guess) that were suggested to me by my sons a few months ago.

I won't give them away (the rooms, but also the sons), but I've got the plumbing in place to be able to generate an exit to them automatically, and to reveal tunnels bit by bit, before the whole room appears in one go. For this I'm using tiles with no animation, and setting frame 1 to be blank. When you enter the room, it runs through all the target tiles and sets the frame:

on blankAllTiles do
    y = p_blank_min_y
    while y<=p_blank_max_y do
        x = p_blank_min_x
        while x<=p_blank_max_x do
            tell x,y to
                frame 1
            end
            x += 1
        end
        y += 1
    end
end

Then when you move, it just updates all the frames around you to frame 0. Tadaa! These are very static rooms, so efficiency isn't an issue.

Unlike the rest of the game, which has had to undergo a drastic optimisation. I'm now avoiding swapping in different tiles for crystals for different states (eg normal, surrounded, about to explode), and I'm using a similar frame-based approach instead. It means we lose the animation on the crystals, but get a bit of a performance gain.

Alas, I think this might have affected the pace of the game, which means all my difficulty settings need reviewing and re-doing. A gamedev's work is never done, huh?

Still, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, so long as I keep myself focused. More exciting news soon! 

(Also,  I am rubbish at making exciting gameplay gifs. 1/10, must improve.)