For the past week, I've been out on vacation, but that didn't kept me from working on Lost Caves, especially since I didn't  have to worry about my job burning me out. I managed to reach a good stopping point with Lost Caves' fourth level, and I added some working functionality to the previously mentioned wishing well. Upon interacting with one, you are prompted to trade coins for either a refill of health, or an increase to your max health. I think these wishing wells add an interesting dynamic to the game, because in addition to treasure obtained from chests, coins also increase your total wealth. Meaning you could be wealthy enough to open certain doors thanks to your coin count. Trading those coins in for +1 max health though could potentially lower your wealth to where you couldn't access those doors anymore, so it's an interesting trade-off I think.

Right now, you can only refill one health unit at a time with a wishing well for $25. Upon writing this, however, I think it may be a bit unbalanced since hearts drop from enemies occasionally (Although not nearly as often as coins). So I may change it so that it costs $25 to refill your health in its entirety instead of simply one health unit. What do you think?

I also actually added one small addition to the level outside of just the wishing well. Early this year, my family's dog passed away. She was a really sweet dog, and it really hit me hard. I made the decision though to honor her in the best way I knew how, but making a shrine to her in this game. There's a secret somewhere in the level that will take you to a large hallway, showing a large statue of our dog, in addition to a sign with a little text, and a treasure chest behind the statue. I haven't implemented this, yet, but I plan to eventually make every chest contain a unique piece of treasure in it that you'd be able to view on a pause screen. When I add that, the chest behind the statue will contain a specific toy that our dog really liked.

Anyways, since most level-related things have been finished, I decided to begin work on the big boss. I'm going to refrain from talking about the specifics of what the boss is, as I want it to be a surprise, but it's very large. Given how large it is, I felt that the best way to animate it would be to rig the sprite. However, to do that, it seems like it's best that I upgrade my Unity to 2019. I've been on 2018 for a while now, and I've stayed there because I didn't wanna have to readjust to how Unity 2019 and onward handles things like prefabs. I knew I'd have to do it eventually though, so I decided to bite the bullet.

Rigging the boss sprite was admittedly quite a major pain initially. I watched a Brackey's video though and was able to get my bearings and understand how everything worked in the Unity package I was using (2D animation) soon enough, I was able to get the entire thing rigged! I was very pleased with the results. Originally I was gonna do a lot of parenting and move joints that way, but I realized that was gonna be an even bigger pain, so I'm glad I did this. As of now, the boss has a few different animations for different attacks. All of which look quite nice I think. I tried to make it look as dynamic as possible, with every part of him moving for each animation to make it feel natural. I have a lot more to do, but so far, so good! I've also begun working the entrance to the boss chamber itself, and also an intro for the boss.

For now, the majority of my dev time is gonna be spent on the boss. Again, I don't wanna show it, but I do think I'm making great progress with it, and should hopefully be able to implement it by the end of the summer!