Devlog #9: Blood Deals and Broken Cameras

Hey, thanks for reading.
This week was all about cutscenes, player choices, and fixing annoying Unity stuff. I added a bunch of new interactions—from trading your stats to sparing (or not sparing) a dying knight—and got music transitions working properly. I also finally got a working tileset in-game after the artist dropped out last minute, so I ended up just making it myself.

1. Tutorial Cutscene – Crafting Incense

I added a simple tutorial early in the game that teaches players how to craft something and use it in a ritual. You have to gather ingredients, open the book, craft an incense item, and burn it to continue the story. Super straightforward, but it introduces the main loop of exploring, crafting, and doing weird forest rituals.

It uses Yarn to check if you’ve crafted the right thing, and blocks the cutscene until you do. This is the first of a few required rituals.

2. Merchant Cutscene – Trade Blood for Items

I set up a merchant scene where you trade your stats instead of currency. You can give up something like a chalice of your own blood (health) to get an item that boosts magic, or vice versa. It’s not just flavor text—it actually reduces your stat and gives you an item.

The whole thing is handled through Yarn + C# without using Yarn’s built-in commands. Once the trade is confirmed, the item is added and the payment is applied immediately. 

3. Wounded Knight – Spare or Kill

You come across a dying knight. You can help him, or you can finish the job and take his head. If you kill him, you get a key item that can be used in a later ritual to unlock one of the endings.

If you let him live, he might show up again later. Either way, the game remembers what you did. 

4. Music Transitions – Combat and Cutscenes

I set up proper music transitions this week. Combat now fades in a different theme when it starts, and fades back to ambient music when it ends. Same deal for cutscenes—music fades in when the scene starts and fades out when it's over.

It’s done through Yarn events and coroutine fades on the AudioSource. Makes things feel a lot more polished without needing a ton of extra logic.

5. Camera + Scene Fixes

Ran into some dumb Unity stuff. First, the camera wasn’t spawning correctly in new scenes. It was really weird because all I did was remove a camera follow script I had and reattached it in the same place, and that somehow caused all levels across the project to not spawn anything. Just my basic UI and a blue screen. I ended up making a little script that spawns a new camera and links it to the player after scene load. Problem solved. I did lose a lot of time over this though so that was unfortunate.

Second issue: the player was stuck in DontDestroyOnLoad, which broke a ton of things—UI, interactions, dialogue triggers, etc. Turns out there was a single line in the Player script that called DontDestroyOnLoad(gameObject). Deleting that one line instantly fixed everything. No idea why I had it in there to begin with but it's kind of embarassing how long it took me to notice. 

6. Tileset – I Drew It Myself

The person who was gonna help with the tileset couldn’t deliver, so I just did it myself. It could be better but it works. I got the wall variants in and made sure edge tiles connect properly. 

That’s it for this week. Now my next step is just making sure everything works, adding more art (if I can), and doing a lot of polish.