This devlog will go over the changes and updates that have been implemented into the new update of the game as well as go over my experiences of developing this update with GB studio 3 and how I got certain things to work.

Contents:

• Update overview
• New Features and major changes
• Quality of Life improvements / smaller changes
• Bug Fixes
• Developer notes and experiences

Update overview

This update brings the bomb functionality to the game that allows the player to explore more of the games hidden and secret areas. The player can use the bombs in the overworld to find hidden caves or in the dungeons to find new routes through the dungeon or reach otherwise inaccessible areas

The player has unlimited access to the bombs in this update as they only have to press the 'z' key or 'B' button to use.

New Features and major changes

• Overworld Bombs: The player can now use bombs in all areas of the overworld by using the 'x' key on a keyboard or the 'b' button on a Gameboy / touch controls.
• Use Bombs to find hidden secrets: The player can now use bombs to find hidden caves in the overworld by using the bomb next to a wall, and if used in the right place, after the bomb explodes, there will be a new cave entrance for the player to enter. The player can now do this to find the previously inaccessible dungeon 9.
• Dungeon Bombs: The player can now use bombs in all the games dungeons by using the 'x' key on a keyboard or the 'b' button on a Gameboy / touch controls.
• Use bombs to create new pathways in the dungeons: Just like in the overworld, the player can use bombs to find hidden doorways, but in the dungeons, the secrets are doorways that can give the player access to quicker routes through the dungeon or access otherwise inaccessible places to the player

Quality of Life improvements / smaller changes

• The player can now press any button on the start screen to progress into the game rather than having to specifically press the start button.
• When pressed a button on the start screen, two options appear for the player to choose from; 'Start Game' or 'Beta Information' which either starts the game or shows the player the beta information.
• Viewing the beta information is now optional because of the menu at the start screen. The viewing of the beta information is now under a menu option rather than having to go through it if you want to play the game like before.
• Changed the start menu screen slightly to say [Beta build] to make it even more obvious that it is currently in beta and not finished.
• Made it so that at the beginning of the game, to collect links sword, you just have to walk into it like how it is in the original game rather than having to interact with it by pressing the 'z' key or 'A' button like it was in previous builds.
• Made it so that the menu (accessed by pressing 'shift' or the 'select' button can be done in every screen in the overworld.
• The tri force piece is now in every dungeon.
• The tri force piece now constantly changes colour instead of being one solid colour so it is more like the original game.
• The tri force piece now puts the player outside the entrance of the dungeon after collecting it like in the original game.
• The player movement when collecting the tri force piece has been fixed so their movement is no longer the same as their regular movement when collecting it.
• Added the Web and ROM files for this project on the itch page so people can download it.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where sometimes even if an actor is hidden, the player could still bump into their collisions.
• Fixed a bug where when the player chose the option 'other' in the menu, nothing happened and they got softlocked.

Developer notes and experiences

GBStudio 3

Bomb

This update took much longer than expected to come out because of some issues that I encountered when developing the Bombs. I originally wanted to make it into a custom script as I could easily change the script once and it'll affect all of the screens bombs at the same time, but when creating this custom script, things kept on going wrong like the relative actors in the script not doing what intended. The player would move to a different location and then hide when the bomb explodes when that was what the bomb was supposed to do. So instead I painstakingly copied and pasted the bomb script into every scene, changing the parts of the script that referred to actors in EVERY scene as the script worked when in the scene but not in the custom script even though they were nearly identical.

Secret caves and doorways

The bomb allows access to secret areas and doorways by blowing up a bomb by a wall in the right place, and then you can go into the newly formed entranceway. The way I got this to work in my project is by having two actors for a single doorway, an invisible actor that acted as the collision to stop the player entering before the specific place was bombed. The invisible actor was just an actor that I had imported to GB studio only using the transparent sprite colour and I placed where the hidden cave/doorway is supposed to be. I had set the invisible sprite to a collision group and then when hit by the bombs explosion, which I had set to group 3, the invisible sprite would hide and disable collisions whereas the other sprite which was the doorway/cave entrance sprite would show up and enable collisions. The player could then walk into the doorway/cave entrance sprite and be sent to another scene because I set it to do so on hit by the player.

Final notes

There are still parts of this update that I want to improve upon in the future, like how in dungeons, when an entrance is bombed, when you go to the other scene, the entrance on the other side is not also bombed. This will be likely updated in the future as it doesn't matter as much at the moment because the player has unlimited resources to bombs, so it will probably change when the player no longer has unlimited resources.

I have made this devlog more in-depth compared to my previous ones to go over all the changes made. I will probably keep doing this with future devlogs as they provide more detail about what has changed and been updated.

Future updates will likely be the other items that open up other hidden areas and secrets.