Despite appearances, I've actually been making pretty consistent and real progress for the last few months (by my own definition of 'progress').

I've a fairly well defined sense of the opening chunk of the game, so I've knuckled down to attempt to get a first pass of that done.

Spooky Pooky opens with our protagonist floating in a jar, memory-wiped (in the best tradition of the genre). Once freed there's a little bit of basic platforming to warm the player up and then the first 'power-up' - the brain.

This is really just a device to trigger a flood of memories, which take the form of a playable flashback section of the game set back when the hero was still a bumbling lab assistant and culminating in the transformation by The Machine.

So, a bit of scene-setting then. I didn't want to open with this as it seemed more fun to play around with the narrative sequence a little.

First up, here's the finished-ish result.

From a technical point of view I've made quite a few changes here. The actual wibbly stuff is all implemented in a single post-processor shader. This combines some radial blurring, some fake bloom and a simple noise function to permutate the edge.

That green, though. Seriously, that's green. Might need to revisit that. I mean, I like green, but .. yeah, that is really .. green.

From a structural point of view though I've addressed a few things to get this scene working. This game is being written in C with no scripting language in play, so all in-game events need to be wired up somehow. The maps are built in Tiled with the judicious use of Tiled objects for things like invisible event triggers.

The main tidy up was around entity instantiation during the Tiled map loading. Each entity type now has a pointer to a 'builder' function registered against a type name that's matched with the incoming Tiled data. Additionally I can give any Tiled object an 'event handler' property which is used to match against similarly registered event handle functions.

This is quite flexible and means that I can use builders for common repeated entities (such as platforms, monsters, containers, etc) but just one-off event handlers for things that are only used once, such as in this case for 'scripting' the lift (when you reach the top it plummets and then jerks to a halt at the bottom).

Nice to finally clean that up.

The next step for this intro will be to get the player to the machine that transforms them, before ending the flashback and returning to 'now'.

I don't want the player to have to dawdle about too long in the non-pookified (yes, that's a word) state, but I'd also like to get them to visit some rooms that they'll get to see later in the game.