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Untitled action platformer about slicing robots in half with a fire sword

VEHICLES ARE COMING



There are a few spare scraps of art lying around and without too much to add, I evaluated what would be the most fun to add. Three taunts, a drop ship without animation that would spawn or take the player away, a slime enemy that launches explosive barrels, or a tumbler with Cherry riding in it. The vehicle sounded like it would add the most fun to the game to change up how levels are designed and the game is played.

The only vehicle currently in the game is the tumbler enemy. Driving the tumbler is faster, but it has a shallow jump compared to Cherry. The tumbler cannot wall jump or hang off things like Cherry can, but it can climb walls. This upward movement will change the flow of its levels .

Since Cherry drives the vehicle, she can't use her flame sword, so instead you will just plow into and saw through enemies and objects. It's effective, and one of the only weaknesses is getting shot. Cherry cannot deflect bullets while driving the tumbler, so bullets have to be avoided. Another obvious weakness is explosions, so plowing into explosive barrels will detonate them, so you'll want to avoid that.

The tumbler is just a prototype and needs more work and art to feel like a complete part of the game. Not to mention a method to jump in and out of a vehicle.

THE SECOND CRANE PASS

I spent the last few sessions working on the player controlled crane. There were a lot of minor issues with the cranes in general such as getting hit had the potential to drop the player off the crane's handle, when the player should always stay on. This accidental drop off was a huge issue for a segment of level that let the player dive deep while hanging onto the crane handle.

Perhaps the more glaring issue was the fact the player could scrape themselves off of a player controlled crane on a wall and be unable to reach the crane again. This was far more common. Effort was put into fixing this and the previous issue. Now the player controlled crane cannot scrape the player off on a while, while the automatic cranes will scrape the player off.

THE CRANE EXPRESSWAY

Since there were around four segments of a level to demonstrate cranes and hanging, I took the time to forge them into their own level. There are healthy safe segments between these four segments that give the player a place to rest and not focus on combat. With this being the Crane Expressway, the safe segments are probably less safe as you need to ride crane hooks over pits. Keep in mind the safe segments are places the player can save toward the end.

As much as I enjoy all these hanging segments, the first play through turned out to be over eight minutes. Sure I could get better and more efficient at running it, but the more I ran the level just to test it, the more annoying it was. I was able to shave two minutes off the level's time, but even at more than six minutes. One of those segments and its complimentary safe zone was cut. Now I can speed run the level in a mere four minutes. It feels a lot better to go the full duration of the level and I'm hoping 4 minutes for me will mean 8 minutes for a new player.

When I cut a segment or safe zone, they're never actually cut, they just get dumped into the next scrap level. The current scrap level is around 4 segments long and since a lot of it is from making segments to show off on Twitter, there's no real cohesion to the levels, even if they're great segments on their own.
 
A BIGGER CHARACTER



To fit more detail in the sprite, the character is now 25% taller, with more detail and a longer reach. With the taller character, a lot of the levels need to be worked, such as having transporter pads under spikes results in the player taking damage. Other areas have fans that prevent the player from narrowly missing the ceiling is now a blockage with a taller player. That's all minor stuff considering the 15 or so levels in the game where first drafts to remember mechanics, enemies ideas even 9+ months after we started.

5+ MONTHS LATER

It has been a while, and we are getting the ball rolling again on the untitled game. There are more 10 or so more backgrounds, more attacks, more combos, sub weapons and abilities, and more enemies, but nothing is ready to be seen. There are around 15+ sub weapons at the moment, many may not make it into the game, so we're not going to show them off until we've cemented them into the game. They are all fun in their own unique ways, but a few of them overlap in their usefulness.

Hopefully there's still interest in the game.
 
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BLUE BULLET: THE HOVER BIKE



In an update five or six months ago, I had experimented with vehicles. The tumbler vehicle was more of a prototype bound to the character with a cheat than a vehicle to play with in game. The tumbler could go up walls, dash, and grind through foes and destructible objects. When the player jumps on a vehicle and holds up, the character will mount the vehicle. It's the same for a dismount, hold up and jump. Very simple and feels good.

Over this past week, the Blue Bullet hover bike was added along with a more proper vehicle system that lets the player hop on, and hop off. It can even be used as a double jump and when the player dismounts it continues going, but reduces speed once it's on the ground. The vehicle is almost 3x as fast as the character for better or worse. There is an issue with it being too fast to really see what's coming ahead.

Other limitations come in the form of no wall jump or ledge clinging. While it is a hover bike, it doesn't hover much off the ground and bobs up and down. There are currently no weapons with the Blue Bullet, but I imagine forward firing guns.

The bike moves so fast that a center view becomes difficult to dodge things, and having the camera pan further ahead of the bike may cause camera whip motion sickness. For long distance travel, everything will just go by the player to give a sense of speed without being too tough to control. That and it gives an illusion that you're traveling a long distance when you can't go back to where you came from. During these style areas, the player won't be able to dismount.

AN ACTUAL AUTO-SCROLLER

The auto-scrollers work different when the player isn't using a vehicle. Instead it turns into a more traditional method where the player needs to keep up with the screen's speed and won't just be held in the same position of the screen. This dual use of auto-scrollers should make for some different types of levels when the screen can auto-scroll up, down, left, right, and diagonally.

If I haven't mentioned it before, behind the scenes of the game, it uses invisible helpers that come in the form of strength squares and directional guides. Strength squares have strengths 1 - 10. In this case, when the auto-scroller hits a strength square, it will take on that square's strength. So strength 1 would change the speed to 1 pixel per frame. A strength of 10 would change the speed to 10. Thankfully not at once. There is a gradual increase or decrease, which I should probably do for the moving platforms as well. Then there are guides. The auto-scroller touches a guide and will change direction according to the direction of the guide. This allows for some great flexibility with an auto-scroller in a giant room. Pan the screen right, then up, then left, then up, then right again at changing speed intervals.

Another invisible trigger is the capture releases. The player is basically stuck on the screen with an auto-scroller. While the player can go up or die from falling beneath the screen, the player is prevented from going left or right off screen. At the end of scroller when it turns off, it will trigger a capture release that will let the player off the left or right of the screen to continue playing the level. Sure it would be good to have an auto-scroller be an entire level, but I designed it to function in a room of its own.

The last twist of the auto-scroller system is that it won't start auto scrolling until the player has found it or activated it.

AUTO SCROLLERS: ALWAYS A BAD IDEA?

I have a feeling that no matter what, half of platform players out there absolutely dislike any kind of auto-scroller. This might be more of a feat that I actually made it, rather than adding it to the game, even if it gives a bit more level diversity.
 
OVER A YEAR LATER

It has been over a year later since the project has updated. It has been almost two years since I last made a new level, and that level was cobbled together from tough sections I'd make to dazzle Twitter with. There are so many new things that aren't used, so it's time to throw 1/10th of them into a new level that I call City Catastrophe... or Catastrophe City, I haven't chosen yet.


COMBINES

The first new thing that this level shows off are combines. Those are the colored platforms you see shifting beneath the player. The colors represent the X value for anyone wondering. They are called combines, because they combine a lot of elements into one objects. While these first few are only combining simple blocks into big platforms, the combines can bind spikes, switches, wires, collectables, death blocks and anything else to them. When the combine moves, they all move, because they are combined together as one.

The combines use the same systems as the moving platforms. They can move along an invisible guide, using speeds set by the guides, they can stop, they can be triggered by switches. It all depends on what the combine's brain is told to do by the invisible guides or the player's actions. The other interesting facet of using wires with combines is that now wires that aren't connected can close a circuit between an open gap of wires to make switches work that wouldn't normally work.

SCREEN TRANSITION

Coming back to the game after being gone so long, the lack of screen transitions was glaring. Bing you're at a new area! Poof you've appeared! Rather than make a traditional fade to darkness and fade from darkness, enemy shadows were added to make the transition look a bit more lively.

ORDER BLOCKS

This was my third time making the order blocks and after making this system so many times, making these felt far easier than they ever did in the past. Simply put, they are blocks that are assigned 1 - 10 with only two appearing at a time. The brain that controls them keeps track of their order making those with the next number appear, and making those with the number of the longest blocks disappear. These blocks have been the bane of some player's existance for decades. With that in mind, they may not end up in a level made for players, but like a lot of elements in this level, they were made on a whim, because they use the same type of brain that the combines use.

INVENTORY

There's not much focus on it in this level, but the game now has an inventory system that you can see when the player collects 3 stars. Those stars appear on the HUD at the top right. Currently stars are to open locks. Locks cover switches and require you give things from your inventory to open the locks and make the switches work. While it's not shown in this video, these three stars unlock a door to reveal a secret short cut.

DEATH BLOCK ELEVATOR

Remember that talk of combines being able to combine a bunch of singular elements as one? This is an example of that system. The death block elevator combines dozens of death blocks. The brain of the combine is then told by an invisible guide to move up. While people really don't care for auto scrollers, this felt like a good demonstration of the combines.

During the sequence, there are two other uses of the combines, which are more obvious, the green platform and the orange platform that has spikes on it. Although it looks like the spikes aren't animated during this sequence. If this section looks remotely challenging, it was far more brutal. For anyone wondering why this section is devoid of foes, it originally had enemies, but death blocks kill enemies too, so the roof of the elevator would be killing enemies and dropping their husks.

TRAPS

Get near them and spikes pop out a third of a second later. Well technically anything can pop out of them. These traps can be stuck over any surface, so one way platforms can have them, floating platforms can have them, ice platforms, and so on. This makes them versatile and better yet, they automatically point to open air. Easy to set up.

Oh but here's the twist. Remember the brain of the combine, and the brain of the order blocks? That same brain can control when they are automatically triggered. Rather than only having 2 numbers active at once, this calls 8 out of 10 numbers at once. Giving a chance to dodge the spikes that are triggered. This is perhaps a tough example and it should be toned down in the future. Since the order block and trap brain is it can be set to time intervals, it might make things easier to lower the speed that traps are triggered for this specific demonstration.

FRICTION OF COMBINES

It's tough to see with the ceiling and floor collapsing, but if the combines are touching solid objects, they have friction and fall slower. This is better seen before the save point with the blue combine lodged in the ceiling. Speaking of that, when you see a combine slam into the ground and shake, that's the invisible guide telling it to stop. Otherwise it would go through the solid object, because the guide told it to.

You may also notice the combines trembling. This is the guide telling the brain to make the combine tremble to warn the player that this combine will fall.

ANOTHER ELEVATOR

I'm not all that happy with how this elevator turned out since it's mostly a dodge death blocks section. The enemies don't add too much to the section. However, these are just thrown together sections to ensure that I don't forget that elevators are a possibility with combines. It's also the section with the least thought put into it, because this entire level took far too long to construct, and test, and tweak. However, it felt like there needed to be something more to buffer the path to a challenging area, but I wasn't going to spend a day on just that section.

LEVEL COMPLETE

This makes the thirteenth complete demo level for the game. It's only a demo, and these demo levels are to keep everything in a game to play it, so I don't forget that it exists. Going a year without playing the game, I forgot so much, so it was amazing to replay everything I had forgotten about. There's still plenty more new elements to fill another 8 levels, but I felt I had to show off the latest level. I think the speed run time brings the entire set of 13 demo levels up to 55 minutes.
 
A PLACEHOLDER TO SET THE STAGE

While the Angell (the artist) makes pretty backgrounds and tileset, I threw together a basic placeholder tileset to test a lighting system. The template is basic, and blue, devoid of frills, but what makes it special art the lights. The lights are added randomly, like every other piece of folliage and background rubble from previous screen shots.


SPOOKY VISION

Why the placeholder? It makes the darkness look better. A simple new interior placeholder tileset suddenly turns lush outdoor areas into cold interior space bases. The game now has lighting as of about a month ago. The game has had lighting for a while, but it was all a jumbled mess of brightness. Now the brightness has been streamlined into 3 shades of brightness. Bright for actual lights, slight bright for the outline of brights, and the darkness that is the screen itself. The darkness can be any level of darkness indicated by the room itself, but the other two levels of brightness remain the same.

I should point out that the beautiful HUD is tied to the tileset, so if anyone is wondering why the new tileset that doesn't look like it works, that's why.

THE VIDEO

This video is the first demo map that has probably shown off in several other videos. As a test, each area has different levels of darkness, but again, the brightness of the lights remains the same. The lights can flicker on and off, send off sparks, and other little details to make the areas feel more alive. That's why at some point there is a blind jump off a platform into the unknown. That's the tricky thing with random levels of darkness, it doesn't always work out perfectly. Perhaps throwing a flare would be a nice ability when dealing with areas of random darkness levels and platforms.

Another thing to note is the checkpoint flames ignite and light up the area. The sparks light up the area, but their brightness has been tweaked. You will also notice at the end, with the character's new taller height, it's impossible to finish the level. That has been fixed since the video, but I enjoy uploading imperfections from 3 weeks ago to amaze people when they finally play it, if ever.

SUPPORTS

You'll notice there are supports every 32 or 48 tiles. I forget which. There are supports in front, and supports in the way back every 10 tiles. I feel it appropriate to mention, because they were never in the game before. The supports only draw what's on screen, rather than constantly drawing them. Perhaps the most complicated part of these simple supports is the lighting. The supports block the lighting as they are in the foreground, but the lighting is the last thing of the game to be drawn, so the foreground supports are drawn after the lighting.

This also sets up more foreground objects in the future. There are some plans to have trees and shrubs in the foreground as the player runs through areas. This was a mere stepping stone to get there.

PLAYING WITH DARKNESS

There is a lot that's not shown in this video that will most likely be constructed into its own level and demonstrated in its own video and post. There is so much that can be done with darkness. So many ways to flip switches to turn on the lights... and enemies. So many ways to tie darkness to the enemies themselves.
 
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