WealthOrHealth Dev Blog #3

Three blog posts in.

Progress Highlights

Art Integration & Animations: The vast majority of the last couple of months has been spent on art integration and animations. State machines, character interactions, post-processing effects and sound effects. I'm starting to tire of it, but it's pretty much done at this point. The intro cutscene is finished, and the remaining cutscenes for the demo are basically config now.

Scene Editor: Getting everything looking and working correctly turned out to be more work than I anticipated. I ended up building an entire scene editing tool to help with constructing and testing cutscenes. It's grown a lot more functionality than I ever envisioned, but it's highly specific to my use case.

Music: All of this also meant I needed actual music. With the exception of a few sound effects, I decided to generate everything using the Web Audio API. The browser's built-in tool for creating and manipulating sound. Instead of bundling audio files, each track is just a few hundred lines of code that tells the browser what notes to play, what waveforms to use, and how to shape the sound. It keeps the download size tiny compared to shipping MP3s. It will sound different on different OS's but I think that's kinda cute.

There's a nostalgic, lo-fi quality to it. it reminds me of GBA-era games and other retro consoles where the audio hardware generated sounds on the fly rather than playing back recordings. It gives WealthOrHealth a distinctive character that feels right for the tone of the game. The trade-off is that the high frequencies can be a little sharp.

What's Next

Cutscene Integration: The remaining cutscenes that use the current art assets need to be built out, and then the big task is merging the cutscene system into the actual game so they trigger at the right moments. That'll be the next major hurdle.

Core Game Loop: After that, it's back to the gameplay itself. Making the claim processing more interesting and doing a lot of play testing. I'm hoping that through testing I'll discover quality-of-life improvements that I can then stock in the in-game shop. If the player can afford them.

Connecting the Dots: It's important that the cutscenes and the core gameplay don't feel siloed. Integrating cutscene events with actual gameplay so that story moments influence how you play and vice versa. They should feel like parts of the same experience, not two separate things bolted together.

Ka kite anō
Leo.