The Moon Fields

[anothergod]

First showcase of the game. Got six player shenanigans going. Most folks seemed to know what was going on with their particular characters even though it looks like crazy chaos. Please view and critique if you can.

[anothergod]

[anothergod]

[anothergod]

[anothergod]

OK!

So I’m coming off of a lot of playtests and things I need to do before the next showcase which is… I don’t really know? I was hoping to do Glitch Conn in Minneapolis in 2 weeks, but they rejected me. I was pretty bummed about it, but then there’s also 2DConn also in MSP and Combobreaker on the other side of me just west of Chicago.

I need to

1. Tighten up that character select, still. I think I am much closer than I was before, but it’s apparently still really confusing to new people. I think I really have to ask the question, “do you want to customize your duder,” because otherwise everyone will thinking that the default is inferior in some way. I think it’ll be a prompt after a bit that just asks if the player wants to do a STANDARDS vs CUSTOM loadout.

2. Make the hit player, hit shield, and hit weapon effects pop a lot more. This should explain some weird physics behaviors.

3. Tweak the clash physics. This stuff seems like it could actually be bugging out rather than just having bad numbers attached. I want weapon clashes to be infrequent but exciting and dramatic. Samurai Gunn seems to get this pretty well.

4. Fix the magic system.

Right now magic is what is said above. In short, you stop running, generate magic based on your magic stat, and the next use of a MAGIC CATALYST yields MAGICAL RESULTS. It’s working right when you know what’s going on, but when you don’t… it’s frustatingly not working in a way that you don’t have time to figure it out.

So I’m going to just organize my thoughts a little bit.

Magic Recovery is your Armor Stat that determines how fast you acquire Magic. You acquire Magic by focusing. Focus is the culmination of 1) not running 2) not using items 3) not being stunned. You lose 1 focus when you run. *Some items will also make you lose focus when you use those items (e.g. heavy weapons). You spend focus when you cast spells.

I need to make 2 different visual representations to distinguish losing Magical focus vs. expending Magical focus. As you gain focus there will be “magical wisps” that appear circling around your player character. If you lose focus they will float away. If you spend focus they enter you/yourItem.

[anothergod]

I also need to add

1. Sprite Swap for all the different possible character armors

2. Tweak armor stats to be more versatile

3. Add 2 more armor types (TreeLord and Unicorn? Maybe Grate Face?)

4. Score Keeping

[anothergod]

[anothergod]

I added the armor sprite swapping into the game so it looks pretty, but it broke the character select. I needed to redo the character select one more time, tho, so, that’s alright. Here’s the flow of how the character select screen is going to work:

1. Player controllers are in the background and players are prompted to “Select a Corner” out of six (top or bottom by left, middle, or right). Push a direction and press X when ready.
2. A random armor class is presented to the player. They can either press X to confirm or press left/right to scroll through different armor classes.
3. The player is prompted with either STANDARD or CUSTOM setups. If the player picks STANDARD it confirms the player choice and they will be done selecting.
4. If the player picks CUSTOM then they are prompted to pick an item for each item available item slot. Pushing X will confirm and move to the next item slot. Pushing O will cancel and move back to the previous item slot.

Hopefully 3 button presses to get into the game isn’t too much. I think it’d be neat if each armor could have a bunch of defaults, but we’ll see what’s up.

[anothergod]

In the middle of making the character select screen again I did some coworking group sessions at a Minneapolis indiegame space, and it got me really thinking about story development for the single player mode. I’m not a very good writer, but I like atmosphere and themes in my games, so I’m just jotting down ideas.

1. The Moon has crash landed to the earth and broken into many pieces. “The Darkness” fears The Moon so it gathers the broken pieces and buries them inside dungeons/temples/Fields.

2. Magic is relatively rare. It comes from magical items like books, trinkets, or weapons. If you have a magic item you can generate magic power. Your armorset will determine how fast you generate magic power. Magic is based on energy and light, but it can be ‘dirtied’ and will spark or even ignite.

3. In contrast to magic there is technology. It is levers and simple machines in addition to utilizing basic chemistry. That means stuff like the crossbow or lighting black goo on fire. I want technology to feel crude and unwieldy compared to magic, but I want it to follow more logical steps than just… poof magic.

4. I want two civilizations stacked on top of each other. The first civilization was full of ritualized magic. It was powerful, but it fell. The second civilization lost magic, but it quickly developed technology to salvage whatever remaining magic was left.

4a) I want it to seem as though The Moon Fall was what caused the loss of magic, but in reality it was another large force that caused the fall of the first civilization and The Moon Fall is just a red herring.

4b) The Darkness will probably be the cause of the fall of civilization, but elements w/n The Darkness will also be unrelated. They are just the beneficiaries clinging to power.

5. There’s going to be a green cloaked character that you follow. They leave some kind of log. I don’t know if this is inspired by Zelda or Phantasy Star Online. It might be tacky, but I want this.

6. The majority of story elements will be discovered via environmental storytelling. Remnants of things will have to be analyzed and combined with, uh, the player’s mental facilities? I don’t want the story to be told to the player, and I don’t even want it to be important to ‘finish the game’, but I want it there. When there is text it will appear in the scene alongside characters ala OG Zelda.

7. Names of things will change based on circumstance. There will be certain characters that tip you off to the location of the “The Greatest Weapon” or “The Most Powerful Weapon” and that might refer to different weapons depending on the character you encounter. E.g. brutish characters might think a giant axe is the best weapon whereas Church-types might think something more along the lines of ‘The Master Sword’ would be. Some NPCs might refer to the player as ‘The Darkness’ while referring to the actual Darkness as something else. I would really like to play on the idea of the known and unknown, misunderstood and outright lies.

8. I am interested in creating a mythology for the game. I want to base it on either Christian or Wiccan mythology, but I don’t want it to be 1:1. I want things to be mildly familiar with strong elements based around living forever vs living well now, but I think I want to avoid particulars. I also think it would be kind of cool to turn videogame things into mythology e.g. the Link/Cloaked hero thing in #5.

[anothergod]

re #8 above

I’m really interested in the idea of “being rewarded with life everafter” by following a set of tenants. I think that’s a very videogamey kind of thing - you do XYZ things and are rewarded with the Master Sword. I don’t really know how to follow this through, but I’m very interested.

Also, uh, the Wiccan mythology thing is weird and I dunno why I put it in the same category other than it being like 1) opposite to Christian mythology in many ways and 2) hip and shit. I guess I know why I put it in the same category. I do worry that I am doing it for the wrong reasons.

[anothergod]

Re: Actually Making The Game Right Now

Things that are done.

1. Sprite Swap
2. Tweaked Armor stats
3. Added 2 More Armor Types

Things that Need to be done

1. Score Keeping
2. Fix Magic
3. Make it clear when the player is hit, when a shield is hit, or when a weapon is hit
4. Fix player stunned graphics
5. Fix collision physics

[anothergod]

Things that I got done today

Fixed arrow bug.
Made blocking much more clear.
Added an effect for Hyper Armor (kinda hate it! I might remove it!?)
Fixed collision physics

Still gotta

Fix player stunned graphics
Fix Magic
Score Keeping
Make it clear when it’s a weapon on weapon collision (maybe this will be the white burst?)
Implement the counter-hit burst effect

[anothergod]

GltichCon was cool despite itself.

Also, I was so excited to get into Combobreaker that I didn’t read the fine print about not tweeting that I got into Combobreaker for a week. So There’s that.

I think I’m going to make a thread on SRK about my game to maybe get some playtests in. I’d also really like to get some selectbros. playtesting my game. Get at me if you’re interested.

[anothergod]

I’m trying to do a devlog on TIGSource because of tentacle growing power. I would like to curate all my posts for you, but I think this is a good one to crosspost:

"
I’m coming up with ideas for arenas today. For my last game, I came up with ideas based around unique combat elements. The first stage was a temple with a few similarly sized discrete areas to fight in. The next stage was a prarie that is similar to what I have now with a smaller “center” area so fights focused more on the outside ring. Then there was a horizontal ravine with a bridge running vertically that I liked, but I never got as many fights on that bridge as I wanted. There was a room like the first dungeon room in Zelda which I’m copping again and IDC. I also had a castle gate inspired equally by Game of Thrones and Troy that I’m coping again. And the final stage was divided into four corners with elevated planes on the center of each border and a grid of statues in the middle that was more exciting that it deserved to be. The 3D in those stages was less used because jump was an item, but now everyone has jump, so I want to encourage more 3D traversal.

Right now I have one arena that has a large center area to fight with a few trees blocking the corners that look like more cover than they are (which I love) and a bunch of grass along the edges. The grass actually makes for dangerous escape space in big 6p brawls because of the possibility of traps, but if you’re careful they’re just neat places to be.

The biggest rules for these stages is that you can predictably guard against projectile attacks and you always have a chance to stand your ground at first. Moving into areas where you are less able to guard against projectile attacks (open areas, areas where you have to block from 2 directions) or where you have less space to stand your ground is the risk you take to take generally better positioning…

So ideas!

1. The upper catwalks of a castle or church or temple. It’d be too tall of a fall to the bottom, so you have to take beams to travel from one side to the other. There is a chandelier in the middle that you can jump on to expedite your traversal.

2. Something with a large central fountain. Walking in water slows you down and if you’re covered in water you gain the “vulnerable to electricity” trait that does extra electric damage. I need to encourage players to go into the fountain so maybe its perimeter will have statues for good cover and stones across the fountain for traversal.

3. I’m going to do the castle gate again. I am going to zoom the camera out a bit and allow the wall to be climbable to allow for cowardly running away and perching. The same blocks used for perching can be used to protect yourself against the rain of arrows that comes after a round has been going on for too long.

4. First Room Zelda 1 Dungeon, for sure. This will be zoomed in and the combat is going to be really, really fast. There’s a central lane up the middle that “honorable” fighters might try to use, but the light is dark on the sides which will obscure combat.

5. Battle on the steps. This will be the first genuinely asymmetric arena. It will have two shoulders on either end that are raised, a flat bottom, flat top, and maybe a landing in the middle. The steps going up will be dangerous from either end if you don’t know what you’re doing. I wonder how terrible it’s going to be if your weapons don’t angle up/down on staircases, but… we’ll see.

6. Graveyard. Gravestones will block off projectiles from sections of the map where most of the fighting will occur. One or two giant graves will be big enough to stand on to have battles.

7. Waterfall. Every fighting game needs a waterfall.

8. Abandoned village battle. Rooftops, catwalks, balconies, broken walls etc. This will be another asymmetric arena. This one will probably not be very good on first pass, but I think dynamic stages are interesting. I want the players to take dangerous jumps and then defend ground.

9. Somewhere on fire.

10. I want a giant voxel statue ala Sagat’s Stage SF2. I honestly don’t care what else is in this stage. I might also cop Dictator’s Stage, too.
    "

[anothergod]

Sometimes I feel like my game looks great.

Sometimes I don’t.

Ugh… I think it’s getting there. Hopefully.

[anothergod]

That neon floor had to go. This is a little more calm, but I think I’ll be tweaking it in the next couple months to make sure it looks just right. Also I think this needs to get some kind of detailing around where the wall intersects with the floor, so… wait for that business.

[anothergod]

So Combobreaker is in 11 days and I have a list of things I need to get done:

1. 1 more arena + arena select
2. Score keeping
3. More items
4. Make magic more understandable

For more items I think I want to do both magic items and items that heal. A healing potion is due. A holy book that heals would be good too. I think I’m going to do the holy book that heals on neutral and bursts on air or tilt. I’m going to take teleporting away from the book of occult and put it on a ninja magic book that is all different kinds of teleports (neutral teleport up, tilt teleport forward, air teleport forward and 180). The last item will be a smoke bomb that should make the goo a little stronger. Also modifying the goo so it lasts longer.

[anothergod]

Getting close to making magic more understandable.

I am also 1/4 of the way to having the Big Stairs stage. And I think I tweaked the lighting in the Dungeon Entrance stage to my liking.

I need to fix some shitty bugs re: magic already in place. But I think I’ll get that stuff done for this weekend.

So on my to do:

1. More items
2. Finish Big Stairs
3. Stage select
4. Finish Magic

I swear I worked on stuff all day. Aye.

[anothergod]

I haven’t gotten around to doing new items, but I did finish the stairs stage and the magic. RN stages are selected randomly. It’s gonna be a good show for CB, I think.

There’s a lot of really haphazard ugly code. I think I’m going to break on showing this off for a while and just clean up code for a couple weeks.

[Notymenow]

So - the ‘nice approach’ (SE) is not a part of the single player - right?
rounds + sets may require some explanation…
Just an idea