So, this week, I didn’t do anything particularly exciting. Lost Caves is now, for the most part, feature complete. I spent some time running through the game from start to finish, and I did notice some things that needed to be revised. 

The most immediate thing was that the wealth requirements for each door were way too low. In case you don’t understand what I mean by that, each door in Lost Caves that goes to a level is locked unless you have a high enough wealth, whether it’s from collecting treasure from chests, collecting coins, or a mixture of both (likely that). The third, fourth, and gauntlet levels all had too low of a wealth requirement, so I was able to run through the game alarmingly fast, and barely had to spend any time in level 4. Right now, I have it so that a print() function runs when a level starts that tells me how much wealth is obtainable in a level via chests, so I’m able to use that as a baseline for how much wealth the player should obtain in that level before progressing to the next level. I updated wealth requirements for levels 3, 4, and the gauntlet level so that you’d have to get 60-75% of the chest wealth in the previous level. I haven’t yet tested it, but I think it’ll increase play time a lot more and make the player explore the levels a lot more, since previously, very little exploration was required for levels 3 and 4 if you spend enough time in level 2.

Something else I noticed that needed to be revised after my playthru was level 3, which is the large pyramid level where I added the falling boulder and lava section that I mentioned in last week’s devlog. I think in terms of level structure, it’s one of the strongest of the 4 open-world levels. (As I’ve said before, the gauntlet level is linear and not open-world). However, the level is so damn empty. Like there’s enemies, but there’s also a lot of sections where there’s not really anything going on, and some chests I think are too easy to obtain, and they don’t feel very rewarding. And pretty much every enemy you come across in the level, you’ve already encountered, with the exception of flying wayward bears in one portion of the level, and the occasional doom skel, which is a variant of spooky skels, which stand still instead of pace back and fourth, but will chase you if you get too close. They’re interesting enemies, but they don’t add a whole lot, and they’re not super common. With that in mind, I decided to actually introduce sleyemes a bit early, which would originally have been introduced in level 4. I don’t think I’ve elaborated on sleyemes in any of these devlogs, so I’ll give a brief description.

Sleyemes are pretty much your typical slime enemy. They have a single eye inside of them, though, which is where its name comes from. They’ll hop towards you, and will keep doing so unless they’re off screen. The further you are away from it, the further and faster it will hop. They take three hits to kill. They don’t split apart into smaller units though like slimes in other games, I figured that would get too overwhelming, but I plan to make a variant that does.

Anyways, since Sleyemes hop around a lot and chase you, I think they do a good job at spicing things up for level 3. They’re also particularly challenging to deal with when they’re in groups.

As for their placement, I added sleyemes in a lot of areas that were particularly empty. While I don’t mind having areas with no enemies in them (the large bridge going off the right side of the pyramid, shown in last week’s devlog, has no enemies on it), I still don’t wanna make things seem boring for the player, and sleyemes solve that problem, I think.

In empty areas where I didn’t think enemies should be added, I also added stalactites or spike traps so that the player would have to jump around and not just walk.

Given how large level 3 is, with its labyrinth pyramid and interconnecting cave tunnels, I also added some checkpoint altars so that you don’t have to start the entire level over if you die and have to regain all of that wealth again.

the vases next to the altars drop hearts to increase your health with when they're broken

I also added a new, rather small thing to the game, which I'm calling a "switch indicator". It's an engraved symbol that will shift and glow if a particular switch is activated. The benefit to this is that, if I have a switch that activates an off-screen door that's in a completely different area in the level (which I do have in level 3), I can put this switch indicator near the switch, and the door, so that the player will associate them both together and realize that the switch activates that door.

A switch indicator under a lever, along with the animation that it plays when activated.

Aside from general improvements to level 3, a lot of the week was spent on bug fixing. I recently noticed that Michael had the ability to double jump if you pressed the jump button immediately after jumping. It was due to coyote time that I added a few months back. I explain coyote time in devlog #2, but to briefly describe it, when the player walks off the edge of a platform or the ground, there’s a brief window of time while Michael is mid-air where the player can still jump, which makes the controls feel more responsive. This brief window of time would also apply if Michael jumped, though. Thankfully, a comment under the tutorial I watched on YouTube mentioned a fix for that problem, so that was a relief.

A lot of this week will be more bug fixing. I’ll also be doing some run throughs of the game to make sure there are no significant or obvious bugs that are particularly game breaking. Once I hit that point, Lost Caves will then be hitting beta! Once that happens, I’ll then begin marketing the game a lot more, and also having play testers run through the game to give me feedback. Looking forward to reaching that point!