[Blog] Vampire Killer Beaumont Engine - Current State (Patreon)

While I've shown some of my progress before, it's been a while since I last worked on my Castlevania-like engine for an Elayne Beaumont game. The Dropbox Archive will feature the complete video, but I've turned them into gifs for this post.

I have the very basics of the engine working, though it still needs work. The attacks and sub-weapon systems are in an early stage, but basic physics & movement work. The implementation could be better, but it feels authentic. I may need to make edits in the future, but what I have now feels good.

Update: Debug Menu

I recently organized some code to create a proper debug menu. It's cleaner than a string of seemingly random numbers and better communicates essential info while testing stuff. You see this kind of thing all the time in game development.

Especially useful since I need to, y'know... De-bug things.

BUG 01: FLOOR SLIDE

A recent bug I've discovered: when exiting the bottom staircase, players may slide along the floor indefinitely. When quickly entering & exiting the stairs from certain positions, players may be inside the floor by 1 pixel. 

I have a separate collision fix system that will push players out of a solid when this happens - usually to prevent a player from getting stuck in walls. Unfortunately, this protection system is causing us to be pushed out of the floor in the wrong direction.

So, I've made a quick & dirty addition to this logic to push the player UP out of the floor under these specific circumstances. I'll have to wait and see if this causes any other issues in the future. 

I can think of a few instances where it might occur when I don't want it to.

BUG 02: SKYWALKER

Here's an issue I've known about for a while: when entering the top staircase while holding UP & DOWN simultaneously, you can climb upwards indefinitely.

I've yet to determine the exact cause of this issue or how to fix it, but I suspect it may be related to how the game detects stairs and is confused by the inputs.

STAIRS DETECTION

The game only considers the ENTRY points of a staircase, the blue & red zones. Anything in between is transparent and not technically considered stairs. 

This is because Castlevania doesn't treat stairs as a sloped floor, but a separate layer with different controls. Once a player enters a staircase, they enter a different state which allows movement up & down the stairs and prevents other types of actions.

So if a player presses both UP & DOWN on the top steps, perhaps the game thinks they are entering from a bottom step and will allow the player to continue up until they reach the top of a staircase. Unlike the bottom step, I can't tell the character to exit the staircase when colliding with a solid floor because the top steps will always overlap part of a solid floor object.

Whatever the cause, I will need to re-examine how my stairs function.

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Anyway, I would like to devote more time to this project in the future. Perhaps if I make a regular habit of it now, I can have something to showcase next Halloween. So I thought I'd update you on its current state.

Don't forget to eat & sleep.