This week has been trying. I set a goal to get a demo out for the game by Friday, which is today. And...long story short, it's out! I'm very excited to get some of y'all's hands on the game and hear what you think, as there's still plenty of room to grow and learn.

You can download the FREE demo right here!: https://seurat107.itch.io/horrified-hector

As for what my week looked like:

I changed the opening Forest area to be a winding road, so that right off the bat, the player gets used to the fact that one button press sends them moving until they hit a sprite.

I coded in variables for various items the player can pick up, including a key, a crank (more on that soon), and a secret hidden item.   OoooOoh.

Having these items allows the player to interact with aspects of the map they couldn't before, like a locked door. The satisfaction of exploring a location like the Spencer Mansion in RE is something I am acutely aware of, and I wanted to convey that sense on a smaller scale here.

This freaking crank mechanism took me days. Pulp crank language unfortunately isn't highly documented, but thanks to the dev forum again, I finally was able to put the crank to use in the game. (@scarboy , your code that labelled and displayed the total crank and direction was a life and time saver. I would not have been able to visualize it any other way.   here)

I finished off the week by adding a transition from 'The Foyer' into 'The Basement.' It was fun figuring out this little animation.

Other things I tackled this week:

-General polishing of tiles and sprites
-Making certain puzzles easier/harder based on friends' playtesting
-Fixing the music in the game, because I didn't know that music in Pulp can be... weird. But by changing some fonts around and playing with volume/attack levels, I think it's starting to sound pretty nice.
-getting rid of redundant code. In the past couple weeks I figured out how to do some tasks more efficiently, so going in and getting rid of some redundancies was needed.

Overall, it was a pretty good week, and ultimately, I put in a bit less time than last week. But I hope that continues to be the case, as the foundations for many of the systems are now in place. Here's to further development, and please, try out the demo and let me know what you think!