Welp, so much for the August deadline... 🙄

I am absolutely repeating myself here, but the next build (Summer) is very nearly done - once again it's a case of finishing off the last few Gallery images, followed by playtesting, then it can drop 👍

Then the work doesn't stop because Halloween is coming, with Bonfire Night right behind it... 😵

To that end I've been working on assets for those themes as well as the remaining Summertime content - I'm hoping and striving for at least one of those to be ready in time for the event itself, but I'm very aware of how that's gone so far... 🤞

If nothing else, I'm quietly confident that the final build (Christmas) will actually be ready before its due date: by that point I'll have whatever time is left between the Bonfire build's release and Christmas Day itself to get that final build done, and - a little insider info here - the game portion of the Christmas build has been ready to go since before the Valentine's build dropped, so it'll just be the Gallery Images that are outstanding 👍

There's also this one other thing... a little treat for the completionists, which is also basically done and just needs some custom Results Screen sprites... 🤫😉

So there's that, now what's this RNG that the title of this post is getting at?

So far the currently released builds feature set patterns of "enemy" activity, with the demos using the same pattern for all three difficulty levels and the full versions featuring expanded patterns at higher levels.

I never really liked this, at least in the sense that I would have preferred the "enemies" to appear at randomly selected positions, as this would feel a heck of a lot more organic than the rigid patterns seen so far. Patterns can be learned, which feels completely antithetical to the action-oriented see a thing and react to it type of gameplay I wanted, but I hadn't so much as looked at implementing RNG into a GB Studio project before, so the lengthy patterns were my sort of workaround.

Here's the thing:

😌 RNG is one of the easiest things to add to a GB Studio project...! 🥴

It's as easy as going to Math Functions, choosing your desired Variable ($Local0 does just fine), setting Operation to "Set To", Value to "Random", setting your range, then adding a Switch Event deciding the outcomes of that random generation.

It's been staring at me this whole time and I only started using it... well, back in May, actually: I've been sitting on a demake of a text adventure by a certain renowned indie horror dev, and while the game portion is absolutely ready to go, I shan't be releasing it until I've finished the music (followed by an apology to said dev for reaching out months ago, only to seemingly sit on the project since... 😬). There are a couple of branches in which the next passage gets pulled from a small pool of options before looping back to the main "hub", and yep, it's an RNG thing and that ☝ method works a treat.

I next used RNG for the rooms in this gloriously irreverent thing; again, works a treat 👍

As of the full version of the Summer build, Scantily's enemy spawn points are also - finally - being determined by RNG.

I've been mulling over another tweak to the way the game works, this time relating to unlocks, but I'll announce that after I've implemented it.

Right, back to work, and in the meantime, enjoy a deliberately incomplete look at one of the Halloween Gallery images... 🎃