We did it gang! Version 0.2 has officially been launched!

The standout features of this release are the first encounter with the game's villain and the screen recording feature (currently only available on the dev build). I will delve into both of these features now.

First Encounter

Version 0.2 introduces the game's villain - a mysterious entity wearing a suit and top hat but without a body. As per the game's lore the villain isn't real, and exists only in the mind of Isiah, our hero. He appears seemingly without reason, when you least expect it.

That being said I leveraged the spatial audio system coded previously to make it so when you're approaching an encounter with him the music will give you a sense of impending danger. Then when the song reaches it's crescendo, the encounter begins.

The music of the game actually drives the villain's attacks. Every time the song crescendos (loops), he will randomly select an attack and perform it. This is what the code responsible looks like:

Click the image to open in GitHub 👆

In this snippet I'm hooking into Phaser's "looped" event on the second layer of the game music. There's a bit of junk in here I need to remove, but you can see when the player isn't yet in an encounter, but is within the dangerThreshold distance, then it will trigger the encounter using this.startEncounter(nearest).

Gameplay Recording Feature

Although currently only available in the dev build, players can now capture short gameplay clips which are automatically transcoded into MP4 format and downloaded directly to their device. Getting the transcoding from WEBM to MP4 was a big deal because it means these clips can then be used without needing to be converted by the player.

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The user interface for the recorder is represented above.

To capture gameplay on desktop, simply press the R key, or on mobile (though my phone doesn't seem beefy enough to transcode in a timely manner), tap the red record button.

I leveraged an NPM package called ffmpeg to do the transcoding, as demonstrated below:

Lastly, I've started doing development livestreams on YouTube! If you want to hangout while I work on Bygone, please subscribe to my YT channel to know when the next stream will be. 🍻

Here's the last one:

Stay tuned for version 0.3! ✨