--- DevDiary ---

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- 2023/05/06 -

This week, I worked on game over and stage clear sequences.

While it's already possible to start the game from the menu and subsequently exit back to the menu, the game still needs more organic ways of bouncing back and forth between gameplay and menus. One of such ways is the game over sequence, which punishes the player's carelessness during the gameplay part of the game by forcefully switching to the menu. Sunrise Doll uses the lives system, and once the player runs out of lives, they are presented with this screen:

The SDR game over screen. SD2020 only showed the player's score; SDR also shows the stage.

The precise mechanics behind the Retry button are still not set. In SD2020, selecting "Retry" immediately restarted the stage with a newly refreshed set of lives, but with reset score. This is also how it's currently working in SDR, though I'll definitely change it later down the line. I do not want to introduce a limited continues mechanic, but also do not want the only penalty for dying too much to be a simple score reset.

In addition to the game over sequence, SDR now also has proper stage clear mechanics: upon all enemies being defeated and their souls collected and all potential hazards having left the screen, the game triggers a victory screen that then loads into the next stage.

Placeholder stage clear screen. Its mechanics are remarkably similar to the game over screen, hence why I took it as the base. The "Retry" button loads the next stage.

Technically speaking, the game now has most of what it needs for a gauntlet campaign of stages, except for bosses and the mechanics for handling clearing the final stage. There are still three big parts of the gameplay that aren't vital to the game, but still should be added, and I will carry them over from SD2020 for the next DevDiary entry.