Asylum Dev Diary 77

The last 2 days I’ve been continuing the work on the main basement quest line. This is now complete. As previously mentioned it involved quite a few different stages that the player needs to complete in order to potentially restore lighting to the building.

One of the ‘issues’ with GMS2 is that instance numbers can change as you add new objects to the game, along with my need to save a list of which objects have been permanently dealt with so that they can be removed from the game when it’s reloaded, sometimes means that while I’m testing I suddenly find that an object has vanished. This is caused by the internal engine changing instance numbers and the one I was testing has been reassigned to an instance that I previous saved as destroyed. Fortunately, it’s not a problem that would ever arise in a released game as I wouldn’t be adding anything new that would cause the save file to break, but it is frustrating while I’m debugging and testing.

The basement has a fair few narrow corridors and some of those needed to have doors that swing from the opposite side to where they did on the first floor and reception. This opened up a can of worms. I discovered that my swinging door code would not handle doors placed at 180 or 270 degrees. So, it was time to have a deep look into the code and improve it. One aspect I wanted to do is have the doors (only the swinging doors) automatically close after the player walks away, so if I was rewriting the angle code I may as well give that a go as well. Happily, after an hour or so, I can report that the doors now work at any angle and they will close automatically. Hurrah.

And talking of doors. There is a sliding door in the basement that requires a key but it wasn’t working. I discovered that I had never implemented my unlock code for sliding doors – oops.

As promised here’s a couple of fresh screenshots. I’ll keep the descriptions vague.

Found the generator
Finally. Located the Generator
Broken pipe
There’s a Broken Pipe Down Here Causing a Lot of Trouble