After a bit of a break, I've decided to add a small detail to the grid, which are small lines that go between the squares every now and then. I think it adds a bit of life to it, and isn't too expensive. You can barely see it in the gif at the top of this post (they go from left to right and sometimes from top to bottom). They have to be subtle as to not distract from the main game, you don't want the player to think that these can be interacted with. And I think it works!

Next, it took me about an hour to implement all the old sounds at the correct points in the code. All 15 sounds are now already in the game, and it's uncompressed, which makes it sound so fresh to my ears, i never heard it like this before. XD Feels great. Although the sounds themselves use a bit of distortion, i like that it's just stereo in general if the sound file wants to be stereo. That's neat.

You can watch the video with sounds here.

Next up I added the old music loops, which was just replacing Catty & Batty's music with a different WAV file. There were only 2 variants of the music in Turnament, and the 3 variant was only used for credits. I definitely need to make more music because this gets old really quickly.

I keep forgetting that I actually used my e-guitar back then for this soundtrack. I really like the e-guitar that I recorded for Remains for some songs, and this was made in the same time frame as Remains. For the rest of the soundtrack, I may grab the old e-guitar and record some new lines as well. We'll see what other type of tracks the game needs.

Next on the list was the dialogue system! Again, I wanted to use Catty & Batty's dialogue system and modify it. For this I had to do the following:

* I added the background sprite used in Turnament, and I added a little animation so that it flies in from the bottom.

* I changed the code of the speech bubble, so that it stays in the same position.

* I displayed the old character sprites in the rectangle, as it was in the old version. I simply assigned these sprites to the different mood sprites and made sure that only the active "actor" sprite is displayed. There will be different mood sprites for Adalina and Neek later on (I've already asked an artist, but haven't heard back yet). Just so you know, Adalina is Batty, Neek is Catty. xD

* I changed the font to make it nice to read and not too cliché sci-fi.

* I moved Hedgar's sprite so that it looks like this:

And here's the result (before i fixed the visible catty batty sprites):

Next, I wanted to try and get the grid going as a global object, so i could use it for dialogue backgrounds as well as the gameplay. In the original game, the grid was always visible, and used to display level number information too, and I want to keep that idea intact.

My first attempt resulted in an interesting bug:

Which was because I used GridFields as broken fields, so when the grid was already there, it used every existing square and deactivated it.

I simply added a BrokenField class, and made sure the grid was only built once. Here's the result, transitioning from cutscene to a level:

The grid is now global, and doesn't need to be built every time!

Now I wanted to draw the level numbers in the cutscenes.

I copied over the old flash code and converted it to C#. When I finally succeeded, I noticed the coordinates were upside down:

That's because Flash uses inverted Y-axis values where up is negative, down is positive. In Unity it's the other way around. I turned the coordinates upside down in code, and added a bit of a delay.

I also needed to turn off all squares again that were used for drawing the numbers when transitioning to a level, but that was pretty quick to fix.

And with that out of the way, I'm now able to copy over all the dialogue and rebuild the old levels!

To be continued... 💎