Looks can kill.

Hello! It’s been a little while. I was on vacation at the start of the month, and then spent a week recovering. In all likelihood, I’ll be doing the same next weekend, so this is going to be a short update.

Anyways, onto the title of this post. Letting the eyeball kill you.

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Back when I put the first test footage of Doorways 9 on YouTube – before the game even had a name – I threw together this basic, one-liner little pitch to fill out the video description:

“How do we feel about the Windows setup dialogue but it hates you? And literally tries to kill you?”

– Me, I guess. September 9th, 2023. 11pm-ish.

A fun idea, in theory. And, for most of this project’s lifetime it was also an unfulfilled promise – Doorways 9 actually had no way of killing you, so much as just hoping you were bad at reading UI. I was actually working on a health system fairly early on, but got a little distracted by moving to a new engine.

At the end of October I took a big step forward, with a system that let Ayanna track and undo buttons – potentially tricking players into their own demise. But that’s still not quite the murder that was promised, is it? I didn’t think so.

And so, today – I did it.

I already had most of the framework for this set up from previous weeks, so all I really had to do was to add a health tracker for the player. Then I set it to update a health bar in the HUD, made hitting 0 health call the existing game over screen, and… that was that.

This was also my first little foray into shaders in Godot – which consisted of

• ~1 Hour of wondering what a “World” resource was
• ~30 minutes of realizing that it wasn’t actually that hard
• ~30 minutes of looking at shader examples on the internet

For this, I’m using a VHS and CRT monitor effect, posted by pend00 back in February 2021. I just reduced some of the more VHS-related properties, and had the whole thing blink in & out after hits.

I also threw in a couple digital… crunching… impact sound things – because with all the visuals the lack of sound on impacts was starting to feel dire. There’s some to play on damage, some to play for hits during the player’s invulnerability window, and one to play when you die. You’ll never guess which one that last one is.

And that’s it. I made an eyeball kill you. Now I just have to do everything else. But that’s for another time.

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If you made it this far – thanks! And have a good rest of your day!

I’m going to bed now.