DevBlog Update: 3rd week of FPS development.

As I promised, I'll be posting an update each week on the progress of my FPS development for the first month, to see if my initial estimation was right. So the 3rd week closes today, and I'm here to share my progress.

What occupied most of my time this week was the ability to allow the player to save his progress any time, even mid-level. That is kind of trickier than saving progress every level, because the state of the entire level, from the position and health of the enemies, to which doors are left opened or closed, have to be saved. It took me 4 days of work to get saving and loading work right.

I've also made the first steps to build the audio system, and I added some sound effects for the most basic stuff like when the player jumps, lands, footsteps, etc. Plus I made the bullets leave bullet holes on various surfaces. These two made the game feel much more "alive" than it did prior.

Bullet holes, yay!

I made several other small stuff like enabling gravity on pickups, having the weapon the player is holding move a bit as he walks around, a timer that counts the time the player spends in each level, the screen that appears when the player dies, and a new weapon.

Furthermore I implemented an Options menu, but I haven't tested / debugged it yet completely, plus early versions of the Main and Pause menus.

A boring Options menu awaits to be debugged.

I feel like I've already done the bulkiest amount of work needed for this particular first phase of development, where I get all the basic and required systems / mechanics functional. There are of course some more steps required, like the screens that the player will use to select between different save files, some scripting for dynamic music, and difficulty settings. And I think a week is more than enough for these, so hopefully in 7 days by now I'll have them working, and thus the bet I placed with my own self, completing the first phase in a month, will be a win. Come back next week to see if I won the bet!