About how much time do you spend on the game in a week on average? Would be interesting to know.
Far less than I'd like due to family responsibilities :/
Currently only managing about 30-40 hours per week. I keep a spreadsheet/calendar of the work I'm doing each day, color-coded by the type of gamedev work (coding, art, design, etc.) with a note or two about the tasks. I plan on releasing that to the public when the game is released, along with copious graphs and analysis. I like looking at data
Regarding the sounds, there was one thing I thought about when listening to the clip. It would be cool if something could be done to differentiate more between the weapon sounds and the glitches you hear when taking damage. Maybe crank up the volume on the weapon sounds in general, but when getting hit the and core is unstable you turn down or maybe even distort all the exterior sounds as if the cores receptors are being affected in some way.
I think the "differentiation" you seek will come naturally when seeing a video. Glitches from core hits affect the interface itself, and of course each weapon effect is animated. There's a good bit of a disconnect when you're only listening to something like this which has a strong visual component.
Do you plan to add any dynamic effects to sounds (like muffled explosions far away)?
My technical knowledge about sounds is not good so this might not make much sense though.
"Muffled" explosions I can't do with the audio engine I have (more on that in the next post), or my expertise since I'm not much of a sound guy, either.
The only effect I do use is volume adjustment, based on dampening by materials between you and the sound (e.g. heard through doors), and based on the distance from the origin, sometimes using different falloff curves depending on the sound in question (though it's mostly a categorical division). I wrote about this in an old post
here, but the next post will talk more about the audio engine.
That said I'm afraid it's next to impossible to get a good-looking video of ASCII on YouTube due to the aggressive compression
Too bad I can't do something like... gif w/sound.
I've been told upscaling to 4K improves the quality of Youtube movies at the lower resolutions. So basically,
even when the source material is 720p it pays to upscale it to "1440p" before uploading to get a better 720p result on Youtube. Yes, really. Don't know if that will fix your problem though.
Thanks for the tip! That does make a lot of sense because the result of the compression is to make everything fuzzy, which has a larger impact on ASCII which is both crisp/pixel-perfect and small. Making everything fatter could help cut down the effect.
When the time comes I'll experiment with upscaling the source first. I'm sure it will always be a problem, but a default upload looks horrible at the lower resolutions. Anything to help.