I prefer punk weirdo colors myself
every once in awhile I load up Faxanadu because I canât get enough of those color palettes
Wow, yeah, I knew I was missing something. Thanks. I guess I just got really excited cleaning up that I forgot that it was a little too clean. Itâs pretty hard to go back into colorpalooza but I got some time to tweak itâŚ
Been doing some effects, trying to make some new items, cleaning stuff up. In general I want this to be AAA Indie Material despite it being me who hasnât really released an indie game since I was in middle school.
The hookchain is about moving space around. You can grab lighter things and bring them to you. If you hook a heavier thing you are brought to it. Itâs discrete and not granular on the force level, so you canât âsorta pullâ something or have both things get pulled together in the middle. It feels much gamier and tighter this way. Loosening it up might be funner, though. Weâll see.
Iâm pretty happy w/ the magic aesthetics right now. Lightning is going to be fake screen burn with sparks like that. I might come up w/ multiple âlightning graphicsâ that all do the same thing under the hood. I think if I did itâd be something like 3 different lightning bolts. The âholyâ magic spells are all going to have rigid markings that have to deal w/ order and right angles and circles. Purely magic spells are probably going to be big white/pink lights and blue shadows like this.
I know there are going to be fire spells and dark spells. I think fire spells will look a little little like regular magic at first but then quickly turn darker with dimmer, more orange lights - like itâs a burst of magic energy that immediately turns into crude physical destructiveness. The dark spells are going to include teleportation and thatâs all I got so far. I need more space control, and magic being the weird-o space control will be a good way to emphasize its unpredictability. Maybe dark magic will let you reflect magic back? That seems a bit too situationally useful, though.
Next thing:
Three different resolutions. The first is everything converted to 4x4 pixels. The second is hifi voxels. And the third is a mix. The third is generally what the game looks like, though I might zoom in for the middle one or zoom out for the last one. Though, Iâd end up keeping the overall resolution constant, so the sprites themselves would grow or shrink.
Remember Demonâs 2-2 where your weapons would get jacked by the environment?
There are three tiers of attacks:
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Regular Attacks stop when a weaponâs secondary âsmall colliderâ collides with the environment. You get stunned by a certain amount based on a number of variables.
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Power Attacks collide, lose the ability to do damage, but keep going. This is useful for attacks with secondary benefits like followthrough swings (which reactivate the damage bool). You can tell an attack is a Power Attack by a small white power draw.
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Armored Attacks do everything Power Attacks do, but you canât be knocked out of an Armored Attack. If you can manage it these are good for trades. These are the attacks with the large blue power draw.
I personally prefer the third on the (bottom) 3Bp post
and on the 20h (of now) post - it looks âjacked by the environmentâ
and the effects arenât quite ineffectualâŚ
I played Hyper Light Drifter on and off all day. Some notes!
The combat is really tight. The tightness to the links in combos (either attacking or dashing) seems to encourage a little bit of the âgit gudâ in a very mechanical way. I find myself trying to get into a zone to be optimal. I⌠wish it was mashier.
The environments are both really evocative and help tell the story. The pickups littered through the environment really help make it feel very tactile.
Iâm torn on the health system. I wish going out on an adventure felt more like an⌠adventure. I feel like the infinite lives and the health pack system really makes each encounter discrete so thereâs very little meaningful carryover. That said, the tension in each encounter is high, and thatâs definitely a thing Iâve been missing.
Some of the bosses are cool.
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West Boss: this guy was relentless. I thought he was the hardest boss of the three I fought. The size of the battlefield here is just right to make me feel cramped. Being able to dash off the sides is hilarious and horrible both at once. The pacing was always 100% go. There was barely any time for a standoff where I look for a way in and he doesnât do anything threatening. If I do a melee boss I will definitely try to do that. I did appreciate that the best time for me to hit this boss was going right at him before his first melee strike. It made it feel like lots of little clashes.
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East Boss: totally forgettable and easy. It looked great, I guess, but I donât remember much because he got crushed super fast.
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North Wizard: I liked how attacking him in the corners was dangerous, but you could still do it. My problem with dashing was exacerbated here the most. Because the movement boils down to walk or dodge, I was pretty upset that the generic ârun awayâ tactic was gated by comboing dashes. I felt like my dude was just stumbling a lot because I was nervous and couldnât link the dashes.
On that note, I guesss I generally just dislike linking dashes together as a replacement for running. Dashing, to me, is condensing movement so that youâre fast for a bit and slow for a bit, moving generally the same speed as you do when you walk.
I kinda wish the bosses were easier in general, but harder overall to get to. I think spawning right back at the boss forced the design of each boss to be a lot harder. I watched a replay of Z1, and the dude crushed some of the bosses in seconds. Seeing people run to the bosses in Demonâs/Dark and then crush them is really cool, too. I think it ties the whole level together instead of just making setpieces of the cool encounters/scenes.
Anyways, stuff Iâve been doing
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Designing enemies. Iâm pretty happy with the particles here. The empty heart is supposed to just be a gib that shows how much you damage each enemy. I am worried that this is too âZeldaâ, but I think Iâm going to go for âcreatures of the nightâ. So bats and wolves and skeletons and whatnot are on the list. Part of the reason is because at 16x16 I need stuff to be midly generic so theyâre readable. I think Iâm going to go for kinda weird stuff like eyeballs and such everywhere, too.
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Parry attacks. Some attacks will rotate the player so that your shield is in a good place to parry then theyâll turn into an attack. Large items usually do this with backshields while smaller items might do it with side shields. So! Thereâs that.
Boss thoughts:
!) a melee boss sounds neat (Tengu, mayhapâŚ)
hilarity seems cool
II) if a boss is easy, make it look great, I say sounds coolâŚ
III) Make more movement options?
and just a suggestion:
IV) Do the Tengu as both aerial and ground-basedâŚ
(other post) ex: perhaps; add a platformery, Linkâs Awakening type of dungeon bitâŚ
Piggy, Paony, Long⌠are my personal favorites (for the sprites in the other moon fields topic)
i.m.o.
the bat looks closest to ripping off (because the sprite is so smallâŚ)
lower goo rates a close secondâŚ
When you pick a card it flips over and rotates and it looks like the second image. The stats are slightly more specific with Heart/Boot/Potion icons. The icons above the stats are the buttons available. If itâs greyed out the button isnât available.
I think this is one of the least accessible parts of the game, but tbh itâs really just a matter of counting then you know how many buttons you have available to you. The visual indicators triple up with the button colors popping up when theyâre available (see the Shoulders and how those are greyed out) and the dark grey line from the button on the controller to the larger button icon
The square should be where i display an in game player character so you know what character you picked. it will requip items as you change them on the right.
Critiques iâm looking for:
- How clear is it that each of the characters have different stats?
- How clear is it that the different lines for items are attached to different buttons?
- I am trying to convey something old, something like Tarot cards, maybe something like ink on parchment. Successful? Not successful? Why why not?
I need to learn how to take better pictures tho
Starting to do balance testing. If youâve got a local crew (2 or more) to play games Iâd be really interested in your having a spin and telling me what you think. @BustedAstromech @spacetown @GlamGrimfire @Bee and anyone else who might be interested.
unfortunately i no longer have a local crew to play games with but this looks legit
This game is so freaking fun to play. Seriously, it is amazing. I need to dress it in dope sounds and music and then finish the single player adventure and like at least 10% of the worldâs problems will just disappear.
I guess I should do some sort of analysis of the game at this point.
I have a pretty full character list of 16 different characters that can all be customized. They are equipped from a Llist of 11 normal melee weapons, 2 magic weapons, 4 projectiles, 10 shields, 3 magic trinkets, 8 consumeables, and 2 miscellanous items. This seems like a lot of items, but I actually think this is just enough to fully describe the systems I have in place/my interpretation of chaotic melee combat. By that I mean that each character and item feels unique and fills a space in my brainspace that imagines The Moon Fields while also not really overlapping other items.
Thereâs light vs. heavy, quick vs. huge damage w/n the melee items. Some of them are straight forward, while others are tricky. The magic melee items give a slight edge to the more magically inclined fighters. The three magic books can only be used by characters with magic, and each has a different specialty (ranged offense, defense, and healing). The consumable items all do something different from permanently affecting the map (caltrops) to breaking through shield defenses (explosives, fire breathing heads), or altering speed/health/magic. The ten shields are kind of superfluous - I could probably get away with 4. But the slight differences seem like one last way to tweak your character, and the superfluousness is nice for what is essentially a nice aesthetic choice.
The one mechanical thing I havenât added to the game that I think I should is giving the shields an amount of HP before they get busted - that will be a nice way to make different shields distinct. For most kinds of combat this wonât be a big deal - you really shouldnât be getting hit at all. But I think itâll let me differentiate shields better on the low end.
From here, I think the next moves are
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Add sound FX
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Add more stages
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Add a more robust set of magic weapons and magic trinkets
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Add a bunch more items
SFX are coming first, but while Iâm doing the other steps Iâll be putting together the single player parts of the game. I think itâll give me some time to tweak certain items (FireAxe, Telescope) for multiplayer. Once the sound FX are in and I have at least 3 stages I am pretty sure Iâll be making a demo and limited key sales on itch.io.
