Devlog #4 — the walls are real now, and so is the spooky action

We launched the project and moved forward. This sprint has completely redesigned the game dynamics.

Walls that block

Before this point players have only walked through barriers as there was no penalty for tunneling. Now the player collides with walls. If you want to pass the wall, you must use tunneling which will cost you some time and potentially break your chain.

Entanglement that works

My previous iteration of entangled pairs was useless. It only changed the level of difficulty of the partner. With solid walls the simulation did not vary on every run and many pairs did the same thing. Therefore I had to write it again.

• the barriers of the same shape are paired randomly during every run
• when you free a barrier at any point of charge the partner barrier inherits that charge.
• Mirror pairs have the same charge and their partners receive it as well.-The observer lock does not send anything to the partner as forced collapse does not provide any signal. So the order in which you pair now becomes an important decision to make.

The secret is stored in a non-versioned .env file, which has a .env.example alongside in the repository. Now the splash screen features an animated “asking Groq…” message that only goes away once the actual answer provided. ## Quantum phantom
The phantom version of the player appears at a random location, moves through the walls in your direction. The passed wall receives a slight charge. This idea stemmed from ChatGPT, although the first version worked infrequently because it required the ghost to be only up to 24x away from the center of the wall. However, walls can be as wide as 140px, so I made changes to the spawning position of the ghost.

The failure of watching seems different now

Now watching an obstacle and failing does not shake the screen as before. A light freezing-blue light appears instead of shaking the screen since the failure is actually caused by you.## Bugs that caused me trouble

• The ghost class malfunctioned in three different ways: one instance is code at a class level, where there’s no self, second is using camera.x instead of camera_x and third is missing out .choice from random([-1, 1]).
• I misspelled the name of the environment variable with GRQO_API_KEY, causing the game to return “no key found” no matter what action was taken.
• The title screen was stuck on “checking” forever, as the timer never progressed during that time.
• Finally, I experienced a fallback trivia answer being set to index 0, which was incorrect.
• There was a bug when restarting, as the barrier I was standing on before the timer ran out persisted through the next run.
  The trends are clear: while everything works smoothly, bugs persist every time there’s a reset or an edge case.

What I’m planning next

Cleaning up the code and improving the decoherence timer.