After watching someone else play through the main game, I felt compelled to make some more changes:
1) The dialogue that shows up after you (unsuccessfully) hit the Ronin-phase 1 with the katana 5 times wasn’t happening. I fixed that, and changed it so you only have to hit him 3 times, instead of the 5 from before
2) When I changed the way melee weapons worked, I made it so you can effectively make a “pitchfork umbrella,” thus avoiding any damage from the ronin. That’s weird, and it shouldn’t happen, so I fixed it. Meanwhile, “pitchfork umbrella” will be added to the list of amusingly-named bugs I’ve encountered, along with “rocket ladders.”
3) The mini-boss will show that he’s vulnerable during the jump by flashing the notice-me!-color as he flies from wall to wall (maybe the inside of his cloak/wrap thing). But the point that was brought up is that it’ll be the player’s first encounter with the color, and might not know to pay attention to it. So I added a switch to the first guard tower that heads over the bridge; you’ll have to hit the switch to open the door, and the switches will have that color also, helping to reinforce that the color means “hit me with a sword!”
4) Some people weren’t even noticing that the player blinks after he’s been damaged, signifying the short period of time he’s invulnerable after a hit. I tried to change it so he flashes white instead of just on-off, but the best I could get was a weird blending-mode thing with a copy of his sprite that stays in front of him. Because of this, I’m sort of expecting issues with it. When you play, look for animation issues with the player’s sprite!
5) During phase 2 of the ronin fight, if you stay away from the walls, you’ll never see him run into one and stun himself, which means you won’t be aware that there even is such a thing as him being stunned, which means you’ll probably die wondering “Why can’t I hit him with the katana?” I changed the battle so the Ronin just walls from wall to wall, hoping to catch you in his charge. This made it a little easier than I was hoping for, so to compensate, I added another fire-guard, but decreased both of their firing rates. Play through this part a couple times, if you will, and let me know if it’s too unbalanced.
6) I’d been waffling for a while about making the “climb up a ladder” button separate from the “jump” button. I was trying to avoid adding an extra key, but it was pointed out to me that the space bar, or shift, or some other second key just feels more natural. So now the “w” and “up” keys are only for ladders, the spacebar makes you jump.
7) I’ve seen a few people now try to click the menu options, and that’s not something that can be done (not yet, anyways. Maybe someday.) So I hid the mouse cursor any time the menu is up. However, I’ve noticed some weird issues where if the menu comes up because the window lost focus, the mouse cursor doesn’t come back when you resume, and you have to bring the menu back again to make it happen. Still looking in to it.
8) I also spent forever working on a new swirly “I died and now the screen is turning black” bit, instead of just the radial fade-to-black thing that happened before. It needs more frames; it looks a little stuttery, but I guess if I hadn’t said anything, you’d’ve just assumed that it was supposed to look like that and was kind of artsy. I dunno; like all the other graphics in the game, it won’t be sticking around. But this has helped me create a framework so that I can add any animation I want there, instead of relying on black blocks that converged on the player like before.
Also, you’ll see that I’ve updated the “waking” isometric download as well. The layout is complete, the isometric tile-filling function works, and I’m currently in the middle of adding the actual game functions. You can walk into your apartment, but it’s pretty bare right now. The walls turn translucent when you walk in front of them, but not the buildings, and I think I’m going to leave it that way.
Also, some of the buildings have some weird clipping issues where they sometimes show up in front of or behind the player when they’re not supposed to- that’s just laziness on my part. I need to split them up into separate images and control which ones appear on top when. That’s just not at the top of my priority list right now.
I need to make a map function, so you can press a key and see where everything is. I need to start adding little wandering NPCs and a way to talk to them. I need to make it so you can interact with objects, such as your phone, the library, etc.
Torque 2D just released the newest build of their engine, and I find myself unsure as to whether or not I want to convert.
Pros: It comes with built-in isometric support, as opposed to the bastardized thing I had to whip together. It merges animated and static sprites into one easier-to-use class. It also, likely, fixes some of the weird issues I’ve seen with tilemaps and particle effects.
Cons: It’s not backwards compatible with the level editor. In fact, there isn’t a level editor for it, so I’d have to make my own. Not to mention that the perks that come with a merged static/animated sprite means I’d have to go back and recode everything that deals with displaying and animation. Also, it’s still super-new, so there are likely to be little bugs and issues that haven’t been caught yet.
The longer I wait, the more work I’m going to have to go back and redo. But I don’t want to have to spend all my time porting everything over to the new version only to find that it’s really not that much different from what I already have. Not to mention that everything I’ve done with the isometric engine will have to go away, since it supports its own version of that. Really, the only reason this is an issue for me at all is because I’m afraid that the help forums I’ve been relying on will start to go away once everybody makes the change. If I have an issue, I won’t be able to ask about it in the forums, since the first question they’ll ask is “Are you using the newest build?”
I’m still going to think about it for a bit, but I’m honestly leaning more towards just sticking with what I have.
Before I wrap this up, I have a couple links to share. The first one is one of those “Top 6 blahblahblah” articles that Cracked makes- I’m sure you’re all familiar with them. This one is about how video game designers messed with people who downloaded illegal versions of the game. It’s pretty impressive, actually. Read the one about Earthbound!
6 Hilarious Ways Game Designers Are Screwing With Pirates
The second link is a presentation that someone gave during the Game Developer’s Conference in 2011 about depression and game programming. He talks about finding motivation and inspiration, and a lot of his talk focuses on methods to use when you’re just a one-man game studio, which is especially applicable to me.
How To Function As A Depressed, Solo Game Developer
As usual, download and play! I need feedback!
Ok, So I really like the new update, it feels more complete and I thought the level of difficulty throught the level was fairly easy, until I got to the birds, in which I died several times and caught myself cursing at the screen, which is probably the effect you were going for. The standard bad guys are fairly easy and do such little damage that I’m more bothered by the “stun” effect that cancels my movement/ velocity rather than the amount of damage they do. The pitchfork to me still bothers me just a little, in the same way: whenever you use the pitchfork it cancels your movement, and you have to release and repress the key in order to get moving again. I like the stopping movement thing, it’s a great effect, but I wish there were some way to, when the pitchfork animation has completed, and the movement key has been re-pressed or held down, you continue walking. note that pressing the movement key sometime during the animation, even the last little bit where the “swish” is almost unseeable and behind you, you still can’t move, and it got a little frustrating, until I picked up the katana and felt much more freedom. (sorry for the run-ons, hope you can follow).
The menu was a very nice effect, I really like the main menu and I even like the ingame menu, especially when the window looses focus, I on several occasions clicked off the window while attacking, and hurriedly re-clicked on the window because i was usually mid-fight when that happened, but was surprisingly happy that the game was paused. Great addition. I was hopping to be able to control the menu with the mouse but again, that takes a lot of extra work, and without raycasting from mouse position, that makes it very difficult, but i was also expecting to be able to control the menu with the wasd keys, which seemed more natural for a wasd type gamer. BTW, How did you program in the pausing effect? I’ve been having to run multiple lines of code in order to pause pretty much any physics code (with the exception of bullets so far) or calculation like velocity, and gravity, store all motion to variables, and then replace it all when unpaused. Also BTW, like the new site, very cool looking, the redirect from the old site takes a little bit of time though, strangely, but no big deal. What kind of host do you have for this now?
I’m using Godaddy for hosting, and it’s not the redirect; 1 out of every 3 or 4 times, the site just seems to take a long time to load. If it looks like it is, you can stop and refresh, and that usually fixes it. I think it’s a wordpress thing, and I’m not sure there’s a way around it.
I’ll look into that pitchfork thing. I was really trying to make the pitchfork a terrible weapon, with the idea that the player would be forced to remember to use it when it came time for the final boss fight. I will look in to resuming motion after the pitchfork animation is over, though. I can see that being frustrating.
And I am thinking that I might have nerfed the enemies a little too much. The seagulls are totally supposed to be difficult, but people seem to be having a lot more issues with that section than I intended. I keep taking out birds, and making it easier to hit them to compensate. Do you think it’s *too* frustrating, or is the current level okay?
The pause feature took a little doing; there’s an overall pauseScene function, but it does weird stuff with stacking inputs, so I had to make sure that all inputs are disabled using a global variable for that.
Did you take a look at the isometric stuff at all?
First, I think the birds area is perfectly difficult, and I almost think the rest of the level should be that same kind of difficulty. It wasn’t bad since when you screw up-you landed in water and died, then had to restart the checkpoint, which wasn’t that far back. I also really dug the final boss, which took me some time to figure out how to break his armor, and then afterwards how to damage him. The visual ques were not very helpful, but when I realized I could only damage him after he hit a wall, then made sure to get the hell out of the way before he started moving again. It was a pretty decent amount of difficulty, and it could almost stand to be a little harder to force the player to play through it two or three times, until they figured out how to actually beat the guy, and the sense of accomplishment would also be greater. Maybe thats just me, could also cause them to be turned off by it, but honestly I think it would be the challenge/reward thing instead.
I got my pause feature working finally, exactly the way I wanted. Turns out you can use Time.timeScale = 0; to pretty much pause everything that uses time and or velocity. then reset it to 1 when playing. It also disables inputs to avoid performing an action as soon as the game was unpaused.
I did take a look at the Iso part, and I really liked it, movement was a bit… strange, at first, since I had to use two directional keys to go the direction of buildings and whatnot, and was a little throw off when I couldn’t walk across someones yard. I thought it would be funny to have a bunch of “Don’t walk on the grass” signs everywhere, at least that’s what I pictured. It wasn’t until I was halfway around the neighborhood before I decided to try to walk into a building, so I don’t know if any indoors areas are programmed in yet, but I did like the way the outside was created, and it seems to be perfect for the purpose it is to serve.
I was really hoping to make the boss fight more obvious- it is just the first level, after all, and I don’t want people who play more casual games to get frustrated and give up before they get to see any of the storyline. I’m hoping that once I’ve got some more appropriate graphics, it’ll be easier to see what’s supposed to happen when.
With the isometric, I did originally have it so the arrow keys moved the character north-south-east-west instead of up-down-left-right, but it felt really weird to press the down key and watch the character go right. I’m toying with the idea of making it a click-to-move instead/also, which hopefully will feel more intuitive. And right now, you can only go in one building- that apartment you start at- the others jut kind of teleport you back to the front door. Once I can find some interior tiles to use, I’ll start working on the insides of buildings, but for now I still have a lot of basic work to do with the engine.