I'm spiritually participating it Devtober jam so I dedicated this month to doing "boring", procrastinatory stuff, like improving foundational systems and strengthening overall game scaffolding. Those things are essential but not very glamorous. The aim is to reshape Shut from a one-level-demo to a full game. There are some visual features as well. I'll start with them.

Per room ambient irradiance

Mood and interplay of light and shadows are pivotal in Shut. Up to this point the game has had the same intensity of ambient lighting in all rooms. To improve the immersion into ambience, the rooms now get lighter or darker depending on how much light is coming in through windows. The realtime gradual change is really satisfying to observe as you close/open the windows. The dynamic range is quite large so a room can go from blindingly bright to almost pitch black as it's getting shut.

Map generator/editor

Level layout in Shut is procedurally generated. However there's a small editor that can review the generator output and make additions or corrections. I expanded the capabilities of this editor and it now allows for making considerable interventions on top of generated layouts. This includes:

• adding and removing rooms for more organic layout
• manipulating doors, including automatic reduction (while retaining full connectivity) to make the layout more maze-like.
• coloring rooms
• placing locks and keys
• specifying column layouts

The generator itself is improved too. It now has more input parameters. This increase the overall variety of the maps it produces.

Map sequencer, mix of generated and hand crafted levels

Maps can now be strung together into a sequence and played one after another as a complete run. This finally has a semblance of a complete game. The system allows for intertwining of fully procedural levels with levels that have various degrees of manual intervention, including fully hand crafted levels.

Dialogue, NPCs

A basic dialogue system is implemented with some dummy NPCs to chat with. The system is simple but it should be sufficient for delivering a basic narrative. It works pretty much like talking in Dark Souls. There can be some ambient chatter coming from an NPC that is heard across several rooms, a greet when entering the room and an actual dialogue that starts when clicking on the character. The dialogue can have multiple phases. When the last phase plays out the dialogue is exhausted. Text that is fed to the system can contain some timing tags and tags that execute script code.

Enemies, Bosses

The Remnants are no longer one hit kills. They can have multiple hitpoints. Conversely, player's dissolve power can be upgraded as well. Remnants reposition away from the player when hit, so some forethought is needed when attacking to prevent them to hide back into shadows and become invisible again. This makes fights more tactical but still in a somewhat puzzle-y domain.

I was toying with the idea of bosses from the very beginning. Currently there is a testing boss prototype walking around in the game. Unlike other enemies that don't leave their rooms and can attack only when it's dark, a boss will actively pursue and try to harm you. It is faintly visible in dark and clearly seen in light but attacks can only be made on parts hit by direct sunlight. A boss is supposed to appear at the end of level, when all windows are shut. You start in complete darkness (which makes the boss invulnerable) and need to re-introduce light to defeat it.  

Game Controller

Last but not least, game controller support is added. I thought it will be harder to play with a controller than  with a mouse/keyboard because some precise aiming is required, but turns out it plays quite nicely.