Tidying Up, Picking Up
Generating all the levels at the start of the game was a dumb idea. While level transition was instant, the amount of graphic elements just hanging out in memory, waiting to be shown, was getting sorta massive for a javascript game. So now each level is generated on transition, after the previous level is removed. This causes a slight drop in FPS for the transition moment, but I can hide this with a static title card or something eventually.
Having a method to generate the current level in-game also simplifies some other issues I had encountered and creates some new problems…
Resizing or reorienting the window required the level to create a new background canvas and reorient all the sprites and dialogues. Now I can just completely regenerate the entire level using the same transition level method.
This provided an interesting ‘infinite money hack’ as while the player’s inventory was persistent, the regenerated level would provide opportunity to repeat trades and/or pickups.
Infinite Money Hacks are sorta annoying, so I implemented Inventory Backup and Inventory Recover methods, meaning any time a level is regenerated, the player will have the same inventory as the first time they entered the level.
I also added a Pickup class which drops a random item into Player inventory when triggered. For the draft levels, pickups created some inconstancies in the plot - why say ‘i don’t have boots’ when you clearly have boots? I added some additional dialog options based upon inventory. This will be something I need to keep track of! For Thievery levels it adds a bit more excitement - the chasing sprites will change behaviour based upon inventory, so picking up a chest with food can anger the spiders. It may be worth exploring randomising the dropped item that results from an inventory-based attack. If you have boots and you don’t want to loose them then you may think twice about picking up a mystery item in a chest that could trigger an attack. I might do that.
Later: did it. also some cute and creepy sprites. I spent more time on the cute one.
