hiya! gave it a whirl; Omb74 found the glitch i wanted to report, but I do have a few suggestions!
-breaking blocks in layers feels a little clunky- great if you’re going for a “hard hitting” feel, but might hold back the flow of any higher speed section. Perhaps holding down the attack key allows you to keep breaking blocks? for example, holding down the attack button when rushing at layers of blocks would allow the player to keep rushing, and breaking all of the layers of blocks, think like when you get a high-speed dash in Pizza Tower. the same thing could be done for ground pounds- holding down the button could allow you to smash through multiple layers at once.
-The ability to hold larger enemies with that glitch is generally super fun. It made me think maybe it should become something of a feature? where bigger enemies could have multiple “stun” states and bigger sizes?(both to make defeating them harder, by proxy of being a bigger damage sponge, but also to increase their versatility in being used as platforms!)
-During my experimenting with the jumping-off-of-enemies mechanic, I found a curious thing where it is possible to jump off of an enemy multiple times when they are already in the air. This is possible to fix multiple ways, but I’ll make my suggestion here: you could add a very short delay before you’re able to bounce on an enemy again, and make it so that bouncing enemies will bounce off of walls as well if they hit one. making it so that you can’t “ride” a large enemy hitbox. That’s, ultimately how I was able to reach the high room on the right.
-Holding a huge, inflated enemy feels funny, it makes me feel like maybe larger enemies should give you a floaty jump while holding them?
Man, all in all I’m super looking forward to what I’m seeing here. it looks promising and as long as you’ve got a solid, expandable library for the states, I think this project can really go places.
I was able to test the d-pad with a retrobit snes controller, so I at least know it works with a GOOD d-pad.
Oooh that’s an interesting bug, I’mma check it out now. Yeah that’s a really funky bug, hopefully it’s just a small fix. I’ve already had to rework the whole throwing mechanic once already, and even then it’s still a little sketch, it’s an odd mechanic.
Yeah the duck slide was intensional, I remember seeing something like that in one of the games and wanted to add it in, even if it didn’t really do much. OH YEAH those are great ideas for replacements if I wanna add it back in, and those would be more out of your way unlike the old highjump.
I made the blocks that way because that’s how the older games did it, plus it was just the quickest and easiest to do in the moment. They were just added in last minute to have another thing the player can do in the prototype. I definitely do agree though, it can really be a pace killer if I’m not careful, it’d be way better if you could rampage through multiple blocks. I’ll have to check but WarioLand2 might have done something like this with some breakable walls and stuff (Yes they did).
So I kinda prepped for this when I made the health system, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work since I haven’t actually tried it yet. But YEAH I really want this to be a feature where some enemies have more than 2-3 bloat stages, and thus take more hits before they’re able to be stunned or KO’d. I’m definitely gonna try to include this in the game.
Oh that’s interesting, now that I think about it I’ve noticed weird stuff like that too, but I never bounced on them to the point where I noticed it was a problem. That’s a good solution, just have a bounce cooldown so you can’t ride them like that. Also I DID programmed them to bounce off walls but it never worked and I just haven’t gotten around to making it work LMAO, but yeah I think having them bounce off walls will help a lot too.
That’s honestly an amazing idea. When enemies become bloated I imagined it being more like weight gain, but there could totally be moments where an enemy gets inflated instead and you can glide around with them like that!
Also if you were talking about that giant enemy, I was legitimately surprised me that nothing really broke when an enemy was scaled up like that. I’m going to have higher-res versions of all the art assets in the game, so I could totally have scaled up enemies and still have them look good by swapping out their sprites with better quality ones.
Thank you! I’m feeling a lot more confident with this project than the others, and I’m really excited to see where I can take this! ^w^
I was also thinking, what would you all think if instead of enemies flying off screen and despawning when KO’d, they stayed on screen in a KO’d state? I guess a good example of this is how defeated enemies stay on screen in Tribal Hunter.
At the bare minimum, it’ll allow people to look at the enemies fattest state for as long as they want, even if they can’t interact with them; at the most, this would open up possibilities for fun mechanics, like bouncing off of them or being able to vore the defeated enemy.
It’d require a little more game balancing, but it might be a fun feature!
(Also this might be what irenicusmw was trying to imply but I’m not sure >w>)
0.0.14 is out, mainly just fixed a bug and made some changes that people have suggested.
Summary
Enemies cannot be grabbed while ko’d or nonexistant, and a change to their health variable will change their state directly from here on out, hopefully preventing enemies from being “zombies”.
You can now rush attack and ground-pound through multiple breakable blocks.
Enemies now bounce off walls when bumped or thrown into one.
Jump attack now has a small cooldown to prevent the player from “riding” enemies in the air.
I’m also going to start taking down the oldest builds off itch to keep it from getting cluttered, if people want to check out older builds that bad then I may share them through google drive.
I’m going to try to get back to working on the game dev documentation and figure out what’s the next big step I need to take, as well as continue to make sure the foundation of the game is solid and prepared to be built upon more.
thanks for the support! these changes definitely go a long way to making it nearly impossible to perform the two glitches it’s meant to address, and I haven’t been able to get an enemy into a corner to be able to test if the zombie glitch still works, but it sounds like you got that figured out entirely! props.
That said, with all these changes, I’m uncertain how one is meant to reach the top right side of the screen now without the use of the hitbox-riding exploit. If the high jump was too complex of an input for most players, might I suggest a spring tile that bounces you into the air when you step on it instead, to be placed where needed? maybe it could have an increased effect when you are bloated.
Also, for one of the things you should add, in the events where an enemy might be needed for a certain puzzle, I recommend taking the Wario World approach and having a “monster box” that spits up a new monster if you defeat the one there.
As for keeping defeated enemies around, I think it could be nifty, but I would suggest you can still attack them to make them pop off screen, or advise against making it so you can collide with them, (this is purely because if all enemies could be bounced off of, that means you can’t use any puzzles that use verticality and enemies in the same room.) except for a special few enemies. Maybe to show this, enemies that are truly defeated become shaded and become background objects? So that way you know they’re not interactive. Meanwhile an enemy that does something when it’s defeated would not turn grey or become a background object; so as to hint to the player that it does something special.
The only way up into that room is to actually long jump over there, you should be able to see crumbs guiding you in that motion. Jump while in a rush attack, and then dive to get that extra distance. I’ll keep the spring idea in mind, but honestly some of these jumps in this prototype are just meant to test the absolute limits of the player moveset. You’ll rarely be seeing jumps like that, and also whenever more transformations, tiles, etc are added, reaching tough spots like that will have a more casual way of reaching them.
Oh yeah for sure, I was definitely planning on doing something like that, it’d be really annoying otherwise.
Honestly that’s kinda how I’ve been feeling about it too, it’d be cool but it’d add a lot more to my plate, and I’d have to make sure to balance it out so KO’d enemies don’t interfere with everything else negatively. I agree that it’d be better not to implement this at all if it means having a wonky and busted mechanic. I think having them darken and become not interactive is a good start, so players can look at them but not really do much else than that. Then if I wanted to I could have a flag I can set on certain enemies if I want them to do something special on KO.
This has been really helpful getting to bounce these ideas off someone else!
for sure! Game design is my passion and I’ve been studying it for a while now to try and figure out what I’d like to do. if you’d like to have more detailed conversations, I could shoot you my discord in a DM?
playing this and ! i LOOOOVEE the movement !! BIG fan of the movement, i think it could be really fun !!! wish there was more of a reward for colecting the kibble LOL
genuinely tho ! very fun looking movement system, excited to see what the future obstacles look like! high hopes for this tech demo ! : )
(though, i do struggle to gain enough height to reach the top of the left chamber. any tips ?)
Thanks!! The movement was a big thing a wanted to get nailed down first thing, so I’m glad people are liking it!
The crumbs don’t do anything now, but I plan on having them being important. The reward for collecting them will be so sought after that players will be trying to get as many as they can. ;3
If it’s the top LEFT, then you gotta jump off an enemy and do a backflip at the peak of your jump to get enough height to get up there. If it’s the jump to the very top RIGHT of the level, then do what irenicusmw said.
All those two spots have are more crumbs, so only point in doing it is if you wanna play with the movement more.
Shows promise! Everything seems to function, and the tight jumps were more than possible once I learned how to use the moveset to my advantage, though I did have to look at this thread to realize the long jump was a thing I could do in the first place. The flip is a little cumbersome to use, but given it’s basically a second jump, I can’t really think of a way to make it feel better without giving too much air mobility.
I imagine you’re mostly focusing on making sure the base mechanics feel good first of all, so I’ll just say to take your time and make sure not to get burnt out.
Thanks! The moveset may still need a little work, with better level designs and a tutorial; but I’m glad you were able to figure it out somewhat alright!
Yeah, you pretty much got it on point. I don’t want to just have a mindless double-jump or something similar, but I would like the player to have a little more freedom with vertical movement than nothing. I guess the backflip is just one of those things where I’ll get a better feel for it as development continues, then I’ll know if it should stay, be removed, or replaced with something better.
Yeah that’s the idea. I feel like if I lay down a good foundation, then the rest will come together naturally. I’ll try not to burn myself out this time though! I know I still have a long ways to go so I don’t want to put myself in a bad spot.
Slowly starting to get back into the swing of things. I reworked out KO’s work, although it’s purely visual and doesn’t have any gameplay purpose. Here’s a peek at the players new KO sprites and enemies sticking around after KO.
I’ll probably add a few more small things, and then release another little build. After that, I’m gonna move on from the prototype level, and start working towards constructing an actual game.
I feel like the movement and stuff feel good for now, at least feels good enough to where it’s becoming difficult to find things that need worked on. When I begin adding more stuff it’ll become a lot more clear what I need to tweak and fix hopefully.
Another small little update, sorry for the wait, here’s (0.0.15)
Summary
Brought back the highjump as a ground-pound bounce, jumping during the endlag of a ground-pound impacting the ground will give you a highjump!
Gave endlag to the ground-pound, dive, and bloated jump
Reworked KO’s to stick around, it is only visual and has no gameplay purpose. On top of that, the player was given new KO sprites, and now will only reset the level when the player makes an input.
Temporary invincibility frames flashing and endlag shake, for better readability
Added a new sub-area to the prototype level, mainly for testing scene changing, and game difficulty when there’s a lot of enemies.
Some jumps were made easier to get across.
I’d be curious what people think of the dive having endlag, if it should have it or not. Also the KO’s not being de-spawned may look a little jank right now and need some tweaking, but I think people will generally prefer getting the see the enemy and player at their most bloated state for more than 2 seconds.
Hopefully the next update will be more girthy, as I’m going to try to move away from the prototype level and begin implement some much needed things.
I don’t think the endlag is an issue right now since the game’s platforming doesn’t require jump canceling right now. Honestly, I prefer it when platforming revolves around committing to your jumps.
Also, I found two minor issues: When you take damage, there’s a small chance the red flash sticks around. It goes away if you get hit again. The other issue is that defeated enemies cover up collectibles and enemies. It’s really only an issue with the larger enemies, but you probably already knew this.
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