So I sent the EXE to a bunch of people yesterday asking for testers, since I thought I’d finally eliminated all the bugs. One turned up almost right away, that I could reproduce- sort of. The Ronin in the first stage (wearing armor) would get stuck at the door and disappear, leaving the Player trapped in the room with nobody to kill. I could make it happen, but only during the *second* stage of the Ronin fight. I’m still not entirely sure why it was happening, but after a few tweaks, I managed to get him to stop.
Of course, I still have no idea if he’s stopped during the first stage, since I couldn’t reproduce that part of it. Here’s hoping, right?
The rest of today was spent working on dialogue boxes. Instead of that annoying text that appears over an object when you do something, a little box shows up now, politely informing you and disappearing. Same boxes for conversations between Player and NPCs. I added a nifty little waking-up special effect to the end before transitioning to a blank white screen.
I’m starting to see a noticeable lag every once in a while- especially when the player is near the fires. I’m thinking that I’d be better off with animated-sprite fires instead of special plasma effects; it would eat up less VRAM. I don’t know if I can bring myself to get rid of the smoke, though; it looks really cool!
I think I’ll wait until the level is finished, graphically, and see how it plays. I have a feeling that the fires will have to be downsized, though.
EDIT:
Put the cursors in, fixed a problem where you couldn’t skip Emily’s text at the end by clicking. Got rid of the “Use a key here!” text; I think the green cursor should be sufficient. Noticed that the range of the sword is a lot longer than it should be, will get around to fixing that eventually. Right after compiling a new EXE, noticed that the Ronin-phase-1 tossed the player up through the ceiling on to the platform above the room. Extremely weird, could not reproduce. Still trying.
I think it’s weird that the cursors face to the right, pretty much every other mouse cursor in the history of the world points to the upper-left. These just look weird mirrored, though. I dunno, I’ll get used to it, I guess.
Things:
-Hmm… Now that he attacks only what is in front of him, it’s tricky sometimes because when you’re near an enemy, it’s easy to keep walking over him and then he ends up behind you and you can’t hit him anymore. Maybe you could make it so “behind” is still within range, but he doesn’t actually turn around? Also, thugs and knife throwers stop right in front of you, so once you stop too, they don’t move anywhere, making them really easy to kill. Maybe they could keep moving?
-On slopes its possible for enemies to end up standing on top of you, which looks silly.
-Hand cursor could probably stand to be a bit smaller.
Otherwise… woo!
-You’re obviously playing with god mode on- they stop in front of you because they’re attacking you, and you wouldn’t be likely to just run through someone accidentally if they’re attacking. Maybe I should make the player move slower, though? I really don’t want to be able to attack behind unless you can turn around to; it looks unnatural. And having them keep moving through you- it sort of defeats the purpose of them stopping to attack, doesn’t it? If you notice, they don’t just walk back and forth; once they see you, they walk *towards* you, so they wouldn’t walk past you, they’d stop and do what they were doing before, which is sit right on top of you and toggle between facing left and facing right.
I can’t really see a good way of mixing the two; either you can attack behind you, or you can only face one direction at a time.
-I’ve never seen the slope thing happen, but i’m pretty sure I know what would cause that- it should be an easy fix.
-Cursor size can definitely be smaller. 32×32, you think?