Progress Report 4/22/2022 (Patreon)

Hello, welcome to Friday! May I take your order? Uhuh... Uhuh... Alright, does everything on your screen look correct?

• Fixed movement for the "Tank" character so its speed is more constant
• Finished prototyping the movement for the "Confused" character
• Updated the "Glutton" and "Speedy" characters to feel a bit better
• Prototyped the "Barrel", "Rocket", "Undead", "Sloth", and "Enlightened" characters
• Reduced the number of non-player heroes from five to three
• Added controls to change each hero into a different character ('1', '2', and '3' keys)
• Updated player and heroes with better prototype sprites and their own colors
• Updated the game to v0.1.1

Excellent! That'll be nine million dollars. Pull up to the second window and we'll have your game update out for ya.

In the meantime, I'll give you the deets.

First and foremost, the giantess and obstacles are still temporarily pulled from the game. I want the focus right now to be on the characters themselves and how they feel to move around. Plus I haven't had the chance to slow the game down yet, so it would be quite chaotic even with the reduced number of heroes.

Now, onto the characters themselves starting with the Tank. I put even more time into this one against my better judgement. I tried several more methods to get the Tank to move at constant speeds, each attempt getting more complicated than the last. That is, until my final attempt, which finally worked! The solution: increase the acceleration. That's, uh... that's it. Just changed a number. Leave it to me to try all the complicated stuff before finding the solution in the simplest of places! :,D

Next up, I finished prototyping the Confused character. This one was rather tricky to pull off. See, this guy is supposed to just wander off now and then for a couple of seconds before snapping back into it and returning to his correct place. Initially, I did this by moving his waypoint to a random spot in the play area and it worked alright. However, I didn't like that he would just stop if he reached his waypoint early; I want this guy to completely forget where he even is to begin with, not just hang out two meters away from everyone else. (That's right, I'm using the metric system! Eat your heart out, imperial system! >:D)
So, instead of changing the location of the waypoint, I just gave him a random direction to move towards for a few seconds. This not only gave him the movement I wanted, but it also simplified the code quite a lot.

Let's see... For the Gluttonous and Speedy characters I just tweaked their numbers a bit so they felt a little better; nothing too crazy. I also made it so they (and a couple of other characters) stop at their waypoints faster and with less rubber banding back and forth forever.

From there, everything went pretty smoothly with all the characters. The Barrel and Rocket characters turned out alright and are similar enough that I could almost copy and paste one's code into the other's. Almost. Undead and Sloth were both a lot of fun to prototype and they were nice and easy, too! The Enlightened character was super easy; he was just a matter of changing some numbers, and also his collision box (since he floats over obstacles).

Those of you who are extra observant will notice I left out one previously-mentioned character from this list: the Drunk. Like with the Tank, I tried a multitude of different methods to get this guy to move right -- stumbling in random directions at random times. However, his stumbling was either too subtle to notice or literally sent him flying across the screen; there wasn't an in-between for some reason. On top of that, even if I got the stumble just right, he plays very similarly to the Gluttonous character, so I figured I might as well just keep the simpler one, you know?

Other than that, it was just some prototyping clarity stuff. Colorize the characters and give them little names so you know who's whom, added controls to change each of them, so on and so forth. Necessary, but not as fun. :P  I also gave the characters a new sprite! It's still pretty prototype-y, but it looks a ton better than squished Godot icons.

Oh, one last minor thing: I accidentally left in the version buttons on the pause and game over screens. These don't do anything other than reset the scene (as far I can remember, at least), and I'll remove them as soon as I get the chance to do so.

Now stop reading this overly-long report and go play the game for yourself! Go! Shoo! Out with you!

As for me, that intro made me hungry. I'm gonna go get some Taco Bell. Let me know what your favorite heroes are and if there are any that you'd like me to change in some way! I'll see you guys again next week!