New Sound Effects

After much experimentation, I have finally managed to get a good idea of what the sound effects should be, no more Bfxr stuff. I made them using LMMS, along with some new music which I'll get to later. Anyway, I've attached a YouTube video to give a quick overview of the new sounds and music, it should give an idea of what I'm going for. Nothing is final though.

What's New?

• New sound effects for various things, including shooting, enemy deaths, ripple enemies, and so on.
• Music now plays during the main game. It's a semi-dynamic music system consisting of multiple tracks layered together, and changes under certain conditions.
• Added camera shake when player gets hit, and a more subtle amount when shooting.
• The health bar now slightly animates in beat with the baseline of the music.
• Post-processing features can now be disabled on the options menu.

What's Changed?

• The game over screen now fades in.
• The way graphics settings are saved is improved.
• Fixed a bug where the player would become off-centre if an enemy collided with them in a certain way.

More On The Sound And Other Things

The current suite of sound effects are the 3rd iteration within a span of two weeks. It's mostly fine now, but there's still small things I want to change. The biggest problem was that I originally wanted to implement a music scale system to change the sound the bullets make when you fire them continuously. However, after much testing, it just sounded awful. The new sound still uses that scale system, but I don't think any of the sounds actually sound all that different, or at least it's a lot more subtle now.

The music has had a similar time of changes. Originally, it was just one track looping, but after thinking about it, I decided to break apart the individual aspects of the tracks and put them into the game under different mixers and then turn them on and off with snapshots and such. I'm not completely happy with the music as is, I think there's a lot of noise in the game and the music plays a part in that, but I think it can also play well into the tempo of the game as you get late into it. I'll continue tweaking it regardless.

The last thing I want to talk about is the new health bar animation that is in-sync with the music baseline. Now what do I mean with "baseline"? So I mentioned that the music is separated out, one of those tracks is a drum beat that you hear when you start a new game, and I'm using the data from that one track for that effect. My problem is that I originally wanted to make it animate to the beat of the music in general, not just one part of it. However, with Unity, you can't do GetSpectrumData() with a mixer group, so with my current music system, it's just not possible to sync it up accurately to the actual music track. Shit sucks.

What's Next?

Adding a stats screen, a new logo, and maybe a new enemy type. There's not too much left to do with this game, at least not with my current vision of it.

Right, that's it from me. Till next time.