This past week hasn’t been super exciting in terms of development. It’s been mostly tweaks and fixes that I find. So with that being said, this won’t be a very long devlog.

Along with tweaks and fixes, I’ve worked on adding a couple of additional functionality, one of which is being able to view your save data in the title screen before selecting it. I’ve wanted you to be able to see what your progress was before you actually started playing, so I have it so that your wealth, coin count, and treasure count are shown. I have an animated sprite of Michael walking as well. It’s mostly there to fill in white space, but it’ll also show him demonstrating the pickaxe glide ability you get post-boss (called the pick-spin right now since the glide involves your pickaxe head spinning rapidly).

Also, since the game is in beta, it means that I’ll soon be giving out beta copies to a select few people to beta test. I was pretty selective over it since I wanted it to be people I could trust with a copy of the game who wouldn’t leak information out or distribute the game on their own accord, so a few weeks ago I made a list of people whom I’d want to beta test. I’ve begun to contact those people now.

Before I have them beta test though, I wanna make sure there aren’t any glaring issues with the game, so on Sunday, I ran through the game once again to make sure there weren’t any significant issues, and if there were any, to address them. This time around, whenever I came across a bug, I’d write it down in a text document to refer to when I start to fix things. If I wanted to be really fancy, I could use an issue tracker like GitKraken Glo Boards, which is a personal favorite of mine that I used in college, but I felt that it was a bit overkill since I’m the sole developer and won’t need a very sophisticated issue tracking system for that.

While running through the game, I came across a multitude of different issues, most of which weren’t a big deal. Some of it involved difficulty-related things, because the game can get really hard, especially if you’re low on health and can’t find an area to get hearts. I’m gonna make heart vases (which drop hearts when broken) more common in some levels so that you aren’t going into challenging areas with very little health like I did in level 3.

One particularly glaring glitch I discovered is related to the game’s big boss (which, as I’ve stated before, I won’t elaborate too much on). Basically, if you hit the boss with a blue boulder from a cannon (I go more in-depth with this in devlog 11), the boss will get stunned, allowing you to attack it. The blue boulder will then fly off and not be usable again, but it will respawn after the boss recovers. Sometimes however, this will not happen. You’ll hit the boss, the boulder will fly off, but the boss won’t get stunned, and the boulder will not respawn. I’ve had this issue occur in the past, but I thought I fixed it. Apparently I did not though. I really have no idea how to fix this since I can’t figure out how to reproduce it, so what I ended up doing was have a safeguard in place in case this issue happens, and if it is happening, the boulder will automatically respawn so you aren’t soft-locked.

For the remainder of this week, I’ll probably continue making fixes to issues I came across in my playthru. Once I make a build I’m happy with, I’ll send it out to the beta testers and have them look at it and give me feedback in an online form that I’ll set up for them. I’ll be looking forward to hearing their thoughts on the game!