Devlog 6: Elijah Jackson: Now You See Me

"Now You See Me"

Elijah Jackson

05/15/2025

The Skill Tree:

My work on the skill tree continued with the creation of some basic stat altering nodes to give the tree some beginning structure. Then, I tied the skill tree into a new interactable object - the upgrade bench. The upgrade bench serves as the place that the player can go to for upgrading their skills. They will be scattered around the map so that upgrading is a process that takes away from fighting and must be done strategically. Additionally, going into the menu in the upgrade bench does *not* pause the game. This means the player has limited time to purchase upgrades. Next, I worked on adding costs to the nodes that could be easily changed for gameplay balancing. The goal in creating the skill tree was to offer more ways of progressing the game without adding too many bars, currency types, or progression mechanics. This is why the skill tree was tied into the existing cost mechanic. After this, I noticed that the skill tree was missing one needed component: visuals. There was no way of telling which skill you were buying, how much it cost, or what it did. In order to solve this issue, I created skill descriptions. Each node has an attached description that can be edited to tell the player what the skill is, what it does, and how much it costs. This description appears when hovering over a node and disappears when the player stops hovering over the node. Overall, the skill tree was somewhat complicated to put in game, but is an interesting mechanic to work off of going forward.

The Minimap:

After completing the upgrade bench, I went to work improving the minimap. The first step of making the minimap function as intended was creating sprites for the player, enemies, and upgrade bench. I do plan on having additional sprites for other in game objects in the future but wanted to start simple. After getting basic sprite rendering done, I turned my focus towards getting the minimap capture to render orthographically. A normal camera in game renders using perspective, meaning that things will look as you would expect with things that are further away appearing smaller to give perspective. An orthographic camera does not render any difference in perspective for depth. This works in making the map look flat as you would imagine a normal map looks as opposed to 3D as our minimap looked before. Finally, I changed the zoom of the capture to give the player enough view of the map to see where they are and where they are going. Currently, the sprites for the enemies are rendering at all times, but in the future that may change to give the player more suspense with enemy positions. The current state of the minimap looks like this:

Interactable UI Update:

The last thing that I accomplished was updating the interact key to 'F' by default. Due to this change the Interactable UI needed to change to match the new key.  With this in mind, I updated the UI to match whatever key has been set for interact. This change meshed well with the new key mapping feature created this sprint and provides a way for the player to not be confused as to which key they need to use to interact.

Next Steps:

Next, I'll be working on the creation of the first combat ability: the Electric Punch. The ability will shoot a sphere forward that deals damage to enemies with a future status effect being applied to the enemies to slow them down. After that, I'll be touching up the weapon pickups so that they are affected by physics. This is so the hammer cannot be lost after it is thrown. Finally, I finish up the sprint with the creation of an explosion effect (for later ability & weapon use) as well as a hit marker effect for the crosshair that denotes whether you hit or critically hit an enemy. Thank you for reading!