Throughout my time developing Lost Caves and using C# in Unity, I can tell that my ability to code has gotten significantly better. The scripts that I've been writing for new game objects and functionality have been significantly cleaner to the point where I don't really need to comment on it to explain what something does. Maybe that's not the best practice and my opinion on how easy-to-understand my code is may change in the coming months when I try to remember what everything did, but I doubt it. Major parts of code are all organized in their own methods or functions, and the update or fixed update methods aren't super cluttered like some of my earlier scripts, such as for the player. I don't know if I'm willing to go back to the player script and change it too drastically, though. I'm sure there's a specific metaphor for this that I can't remember, but imagine a tower of cobbled together Jenga  blocks. It's far from organized and is a bit of a mess, but it works, and is somewhat structurally sound. The instant you try to pull one of those Jenga blocks out though, or change a large portion of code, it all comes crumbling down. That said, however. I'm strongly considering recoding the game's wayward bear mid-boss. It works somewhat, but it's also really messy, and I can afford to redo the code, and can probably make a much cleaner boss battle. The boss code was really rushed honestly, and I did it in like, a single night for my 2D game design class. It wasn't even required, but my game just wouldn't feel complete in the scope of the class without a working boss to end things off. Now that my coding abilities have increased significantly, I'm confident I could redo the boss's functionality from the ground up in a much more efficient way, and probably make the boss fight more interesting, since all he does is slam on the ground and hop around. Nothing too exciting.

I said that I didn't want to make any significant changes to the player's code, but honestly, I kinda lied. To preface this, I came across this video on YouTube by Jonas Tyroller titled "5 reasons your indie platformer game sucks!" I decided to swallow my pride and watch it, and while the video was pretty harsh, it brought up some excellent points, notably the usefulness of jump buffering and coyote time. Jump buffering is when you give the player a small window of time before hitting the ground where if they hit the jump button, it'll still register as a jump. Coyote time is similar, but is handled when you walk off a ledge. This gives you a small window of time to still be able to jump after walking off a ledge. The point of those two is to make the jump button feel more precise, which ironically does the opposite. Anyways, I decided to add this functionality to my game and ended up making some significant changes to the player code regarding how Michael jumps. I had to jump through some hoops to get it working, but I eventually made it work, and I gotta say, Michael (the player) feels a lot better now, and I think it'll make the gameplay experience a lot better with those two additions.

Tyroller brought up another point though, which was "why are you making a 2D platformer?". As in "why are you making one when the market is so saturated", and the idea was that you should have a good reason to make one if you plan to sell it. It kinda concerned me a bit, because Lost Caves, at least surface level, isn't anything crazy. Long term I hope to really flesh it out, but right now it's rather basic. That said, it does something that few platformers do, and that is having expansive sandbox-style levels with a heavy focus on exploration. Sure, there are metroidvanias, but those aren't quite the same thing. Lost Caves is pretty much a 2D collectathon like Super Mario 64, or the Banjo Kazooie games. Such an idea has been done, but not a lot, so I think in terms of level design, Lost Caves still has something to offer that sets it apart from the many more linear platformers out there.

Anyways, onto why I titled this devlog "Blue Boulder Blaster" I recently added a mechanic into the game that involves using a cannon to blast away barriers in your way. This cannon would be loaded with blue bouncy boulders. Earlier in the game, you come across blue bouncy rocks, and if you whack one with your pickaxe, the blue rock shoots off with high velocity. It's used in the mid-boss fight to knock out  the mid-boss to be able to damage it. (see it in action here.) Anyways, there will also be large blue boulders that can't be flung at high velocity with your pickaxe, so you'd instead load these boulders into a cannon barrel in the ground. That will trigger the cannon to come out and get into position to be used. The cannon barrel would move up and down and you'd flick a lever when at the right angle, and it will blast out the boulder with high force and velocity, being able to destroy barriers in your way.

It's immensely satisfying, and I think it could be used for some cool stuff. It's main use will be for the game's big boss fight, which I've already begun to make significant progress on. However, I won't be discussing it on here for now, as I want to keep the big boss info a secret/surprise.

Making the cannon was a lot of fun, and adding all the little effects really made it more and more satisfying. I got to learn about doing actual movement-based animation, which I did very little of before. Normally I'd try to do this entire animation with lerps and vector2.movetowards, but that'd be a royal pain in the butt to make look good, and Unity animations make it suuuuuper easy. It'll be really helpful for making other complex movements and animations down the line.

All-in-all, significant progress has been made in terms of general functionality. More sound effects have also been added and tweaked to make hitting enemies sound more satisfying. The lower portion of the 4th level that I spoke about last week is also coming along well, and I may do another devlog showing progress for it later this week. This one's already getting kind of long though, so I'll leave it there. Lot's of stuff has been done, but I have a lot more ahead of me. Hopefully the game will be feature complete in the scope of its 2020 release by the end of the summer!