Week 7: More bug fixes and shiny new levels!

My new baked torch-flame animation.
Much more efficient than dynamically creating flame particles on-the-fly.

tl;dr: I fixed a lot of little bugs and created new levels!

What happened last week?

Note: Just to clarify things a bit, each "level" in Inner-Tube Climber consists of a series of "tiers". If you fall, you will restart on the latest tier that you have reached. So "level" creation, is really mostly just "tier" creation.

I fixed a lot of little bugs!

• Fixed a performance issue with a very slow frame when reaching a new tier.
• Replaced individually defined inner-wall tiles with a more-efficient single large non-collidable colored rectangle.
• Replaced dynamically rendered torch particles with much more-efficient "baked" particles.
• Fixed a confusingly reported bug where my CameraController would reference the already `queue_freed` (deallocated) camera, but the reference wasn’t null yet.
• Godot would throw an error saying the camera is null, despite having just passed a null check in an `if` statement.
• Apparently, Godot has multiple, inconsistent types of null. Yay...
• Adjusted player collision width, so that they can squeeze through one-tile-wide gaps.
• Deferred my Audio calls until the next frame, since the calling frame is usually pretty busy.
• Slightly increased the mobile-control-v1 reverse-direction distance threshold.
• Added a guard preventing movement past tier-start bounds when still jumping from previous tier.
• Before, it was pretty easy to be bouncing side-to-side out of control from the end of the previous tier, and then fly right off the edge of the new tier.
• Fixed a bunch of issues with snow transitions when reaching a new tier.
• Updated the debug panel to show on all screens, not just the game-play screen.
• Fixed a long-standing bug where max-height indicators would sometimes not align correctly.
• This was due to an annoying bug in Godot's Tween system, where the property or method would not always be set with the final end state; so when I was sliding the indicator upward, it would sometimes stop short.
• Replace all native GDScript `print` invocations to now print to my custom DebugPanel instead.
• `print` statements are surprisingly expensive.
• Also, `print` statements aren't as usable on mobile devices, or in non-local releases.
• Refactor the music sequence to now be encoded as part of level configurations.
• This gives me more control of which music is played during which tier.
• Fix when the rate-app screen is shown.
• It was being shown too early, after the player clears their first level.
• I want the player to instead clear a few levels before pestering them with this.
• Fix a bug that would flash a newly unlocked level-select item as unlocked briefly before starting the animation to show it being unlocked.
• Enlarged the LevelSelect button on the game-over screen to make it more prominent.
• Adjust mobile-control jump-tap region to be only a third of the screen width.
• The drag-sideways region needed more space.
• Added better screen-size configuration for debugging.
• Adjusted in-air player movement to be more responsive to wind.
• Disabled screen inputs while screen navigations are in progress.
• I was seeing occasional bugs when clicking on a button from a screen that wasn't quite ready to handle clicks yet.
• Added a jump-with-right-hand option, for left-handers.
• Fixed max-height indicators for horizontally-scrolling tiers.
• They weren't following the horizontal camera pan before.
• Fix fog screen opacity and wind speed.
• Fix one-way collisions in ice-wall tiles.
• Fix the sound effects toggling setting.
• Refactored OpennessType to be assigned within the top-level tier-configurations file rather than on individual Tier scene.
• Added a new open-sided tier base.
• Replaced the pause-screen Home button with a Quit button, which instead sends you to the game-over screen and saves your score.
• Added support for clicking on an About button in a labeled-control-list row in order to open a screen showing more information.
• This is useful for explaining how changing the difficulty mode will affect gameplay.
• Added support for removing extra lives in HARD mode.
• Fix an issue with overlapping music fade transitions.
• Added support for playing each individual tier in its own separate level, to make playtesting easier.

AND, most importantly, I created a lot of new tiers and started created the overall level progression!

A new tier, making use of strong upward wind for increased jump distance!

A new tier, making use of a dark fog effect and strong sideways wind!

What's next?

• Create even more tiers!
• Polish my level progression.
• I need to make some of the early tiers easier.
• And I need to design things so that the player can easily learn new mechanics bit by bit.
• A few more bug fixes.

🎉 Cheers!