Progress & Thoughs - 26 (Patreon)

Xmas is around the corner! Hope you having a great time.
Been doing some tweaking to shield mechanics, adding some new inbetween rooms to expand the level design and some other stuff!

Controller support trouble.
I'm trying to add controller support, since lots of people who played the public Demo prefer to play with controller, but I'm having trouble with the movement animations bugging.

Throwing rocks.
I had some trouble making the rocks destroy all the blocks without actually collision and bounce back.

Simple is always better.
I decided to give the rock an outside hitbox that deletes the blocks before the actual rock collisions. Simple but effective.

Pick-up objects.
You can now pick up objects, they can be used to solve puzzles or be required to open doors, quests, etc.
You can't do many actions while carrying an objects, such as; climb, crawl.

Lightbeams.
Just a visual addition, but looks amazing. Problem was that having too many caused lag. I tried to draw them using surfaces, but it didn't work, maybe it's the code  I use to detect collisions and redraw the length. I ended up disabling them if they're too far away from the player.

An example of how it looks with an ingame background. A grasswall.

This technique can be used for many things, for example this waterfall.

New enemy.
I wanted to make more enemies that don't walk around, atk, etc.
Those need lots of animations, I needed something to fill the area, something that makes you stop for a second just to attack it, then keep going, I saw those kind of enemies in other games, I guess it's a good idea to have those lying around. Even if no one is going to die to them.

Something interesting.
Just for the fun, adter doing the worm enemy. I got interest in the draw_line code function, and got the idea of some creature-thing that can eat money. Yes I'm that evil.

I ended up making this darkness monster who likes to eat bright stuff. And not only money, but potions, ammo, etc.

After a bit of work, I added an elbow to it's streetchy arm, and it was done!
Players first instict when encountering this thing and seeing it's eating their money its going to be killing it. But there may be some benefits in letting it eat money c:

It's Kratos time.
I got the idea of adding a throwable axe, nothing to do with Kratos, no no.
My idea was to re-implement the pulling mechanic on pushable blocks. So I though of doing it with an usable. A throwable axe. I used the boomerang mechanics as a base to save time.

Sprite + collisions.
I made a frost axe, maybe way too similar to Krato's Axe. And since the axe is meant to get stuck on blocks, the collision had to be better than the boomerang, it needed some work.

After a bit of work it was taking good shape, but I didn't like using the basic throwing animation for the axe. So I had to do a new one.

This one shows the axe in Zoria's hands before throwing it, I think it looks better c:
Now just needed to be able to call the axe back to have all the basic mechanics.

Calling the axe back.
While testing I noticed the axe got stuck in the ground and it looked kinda messy.
ft. Sentinel goblin that doesn't like me testing stuff in their home-land.
Now it just needed some icy particles for the final product.

Particles + disable collisions.
Added some fancy icy particles and some ice on impact to give it the final touches.
I solved the problems of calling the axe back by just disabling it's collisions when calling it back.

Pulling blocks.
The whole point of this usable was to pull blocks, I almost forgot about it when playtesting, I gotta say, it's pretty fun throwing it around and killing enemies with it.
Makes me regret not giving Zoria an axe as a default weapon.

Puzzle potential.
And with that, we got a fun puzzle mechanic, pulling blocks with an axe! Calling back the axe can take a bit if you threw it far away. (The room size is the limit) So It may be better not calling it back if there're enemies near and you threw it into the sky.
I know I could just make the axe stop at a certain distance, but I prefer it being hard to use.

Custom Death animations.
I made a poll long, long ago about having custom death animations or not, and you guys voted yes. I know I take so long to work on certain stuff, but I want to make sure I can do them right. As for the animation, I wasn't happy with this one.

Needed more impact.
I ended up doing this animation instead of the other one, some people got scared at twitter. Guess that's a good thing?
*Spikes are insta-kill only in hardcore game mode.

As a last thing, I made so you can't get stuck into walls when pulling a block. It was annoying while playtesting.
I though of changing the Axe element to Electricity to avoid it being too similar to Kratos'. It could be useful to activate certain Ancient's Machines or something.

That's all for now! I think AI doesn't like Zoria.

L♥ve - AllFenom ♥