Bounty Bros. #9: Boom!

Well! While half this month went by without me noticing, the second half has still managed to produce as exciting results as I thought it would and more!

Previously I had mentioned we were going to dive into game mechanics. And that we did! But in addition to this I had mentioned that we would start nailing down our system for building cut scenes into the game. I had assumed that this was going to be after September, but as fate would have it, an idea struck me on how we might manage making cut scenes and I decided to write down the code before I forgot the concept. And what do you know! I got it done in 9 hours! Similar to how I handle the dialog boxes, the cut scenes are defined and hot-reloaded in a YAML file with custom commands that I first define in the Rust backend. Instead of getting into detail about what it does, how about you just take a look for yourself.

That's a cut scene in action, followed by me and Harsulin controlling the characters ourselves. And we now have dynamite for blasting snakes ( even though the snakes don't put you in any real danger yet ).

Now I knew that if I was reviewing a small portion of the cut scene, I didn't want to have to restart the whole scene just to see a small change. So, what I did was make a small UI element that is simply a timeline slider with the seconds of the cut scene marked along it. When you click a spot on the timeline it restores a snapshot of the game world from when the cut scene started, then fast-forwards to the time that you clicked. This makes it much easier to edit. Check it out.

I have to re-iterate, it only took me nine hours to make the cut scene systems and UI, not including making the cut scene itself. I can't speak for how well other engines could do this, but it feels amazing to just slam a feature like that in with an in game viewer and hardly a technical challenge to get in the way.

It's a huge relief and surprise to feature cut scenes here. It was the final major feature that was new to us using the engine. It means that on some level "we're home free" so to speak, with gameplay mechanics and level design being the majority of what remains. There's still a lot to do, but removing the unknowns relieves a lot of potential anxiety. And even with all of the features and polish that I still want to add to our map editor, debug UI, and cut scene viewer, they're all easy pickings now that the base functionalities are there.

We keep moving forward and we don't intend to stop now. Stick with us as we discover what we can do.

Written by, Latency: Lead Game Programmer at K-tech Studio