The Hat Devlog #1 | UI, weapons and mechanics.

Hey there, Niflax here.

So some of you know that I have made a post saying that the developement of the game I'm making, The Hat Boy.  Since then, I've worked a lot on it to make it  a better, more comfortable game experience. This devlog series will focus on new changes and improvements.

Anyway, let's start with the changes that have been done. 


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User Interface

If you've played the original game, you might remember that the UI (User Interface) was very minimal. It was consisted of a health bar only, that's it. I've tried my best to make it look better and feel more appealing and more clearer.

For comparaison, this is the old UI:

And this is the new one:

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      The Movement
Some of you might also remember that the character was always seeming to walk on ice, like if it was sliding on ice. Like here, you can see what would have happened in the alpha version. It it now changed to move directly where you want, obviously to make it way more controlable. I sadly can't show it because the limit to upload gif and images are of 3mb per file and I cannot find a way to compress it :(

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      Weapons
One of the things I really wanted to do in the original was to make multiple weapons, such as having also melee attacks. However, I couldn't do it because I lost the original file to work back on the project.  But now, some new weapons have been introduced, such as melee currently only having fists for now, the pistol and a shotgun. I also plan to make other weapons that you could buy in a safe area, like a lobby before you would start a level and you would get money by completing missions,  killing ennemies or doing side quests.


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       Ennemies

 Remember when the ennemies where dumb and only tried to follow you to kill you? Yeah they're gone now...... at least for now, I might re-implement them for another time. Anyway, I've only made one enemy, but is actually way smarter than the rest.

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       What is that green icon in the UI?
That, is an indicator to tell the player when a certain upgrade is available. Yes you've read correctly, upgrades are now a thing. It's something that I really wanted to add to make the gameplay a bit more complex because I felt the original was very poor in term of fighting. I'm not telling what that upgrade is. HOWEVER, I might release a build for players to play if they want to try it and give feedback.

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Well, sort of.  I've thought of maybe trying to release the game on Steam. This is a pretty big thing and something I've never done before. But I will try to do it.

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          Devlog #1 conclusion
I really didn't expected to make a devlog that long.  I really love trying to learn from my mistakes and make better games every time, instead of giving excuses like "oh it's just the game is made" like I used to. I think the best part is seeing the improvement from all the ways, like seeing how the game looks progressively better as you know more and having better understanding of how game design works. 

That being said, I will continue working on it, and making sure to make the best game I can do.  See you next time :)
- Niflax