Slides testing

I've been re-drawing the water slides directly on the "three rooms" test screen, because it feels easier to prototype there than within the reconstructed green zone level. Then I've been prototyping different things about it that I had in my notes ... only mostly ruling out some options so far. For instance, the idea of re-using the sprite of waterjets to avoid issues with waterfall-to-slide transition should be forgotten ... it helped me coding something to select the layer where Gobs should appear ... one of the things I'll need for the smashing fist.

Another such test was placing some special tiles along the slide, in an attempt to make them trigger some "fall and slide on slippery ground". 

That failed. Almost completely. I had to create an empty animation just to avoid the normal "special blocks handling" from deleting chunks of the slope as soon as Bilou touched them.

I also had to drop the idea of placing "jet" tiles in an attempt to push Bilou harder out of the slope at its bottom : they allowed (but only sometimes) Bilou to hover the whole slide upwards ! 

That fist goes SMASHing

It took me about 30 minutes to finally craft the script needed to bring in the smashing fist I had drawn back in February. I'm a bit sorry that it took me so many month to finally be ready to write that script. Part of it because I had not given it any priority over applemen or sliding water, but mostly because finding some time for doing homebrew is more and more complicated, unfortunately ^^".

(screenshot saturday on mastodon and bsky) 

Similarly to what happened with the rolling appleman, having the bare functionality is just unlocking many other things to do to get it satisfying, like having dust clouds when it hits the ground of having some screen shaking. 

ALT+F5

It's been decades I'm using the ALT+F5 combo to spawn a new terminal. I couldn't even tell if that was some default settings of Enlightenment, some defaults of the window manager I used before enlightenment or something that just felt natural since ALT+F4 closes a window.

But of course that doesn't work with Windows ... but maybe it could. Let's locate my `User Pinned\TaskBar` first, which appears to be in some sub-folder of Internet Explorer within the hidden AppData (and well, a good old dir /s TaskBar remains the most reliable way to find out)

After that, configuring is even easier than changing the icon. There was a "Shortcut key" field waiting for me, in the "shortcut" panel ... I'm baffled. How could I've been missing it for over 10 years if it was so easy ? Was it something introduced only in recent versions of Windows ? it was there since Windows 98 SE...

So I know win32gui (from pywin32) can script some actions to some Windows the way eesh used to do. Can I bind some key to "uniconify the music player" ?

def callback(hwnd, any):
     global found
     if win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd) == any:
         found = hwnd
     if any in win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd):
         print("%s - %s" % (str(hwnd), win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd)))
         
w.EnumWindows(callback, "VLC")

can find me some stuff (thanks the doc) once found, I can use ShowWindow to switch between win32con.SW_RESTORE and win32con.SW_SHOWMINIMIZED (thanks the rubber duck, I guess)

• Window class is useless. It just tells me VLC is coded in QT :P
• the "select media" key I want to use does not seem to be usable as a shortcut ... can I use powertoys key remapping to deal with that ?
• it turns out these are 'AppKeys' in Windows vocabulary, and there are registry keys to define what happens when you hit them (surprisingly, this was all empty on my machine)
• "Run: minimized" on the link to the python script avoids flashing black command window

Funnier Apples

Depuis le début de mon carnet en cours, j'ai un objectif "rendre les pommes plus fun". ça passera par des interactions révisées mais aussi par des compléments d'animation. Entre autre, quand on lance un appleman et qu'il arrive par terre. Le comportement actuel est tiré de dumblador, qui glisse légèrement sur les surfaces planes de l'école avant de s'immobiliser assez rapidement.

Finally! that little sketch of an appleman rolling away when hitting the ground has been teasing me for month at the start of my notebook, but now I've finally sketched something in AnimEDS. Hopefully I could try to integrate it in the prototype this week-end.

It should trigger when you've thrown an appleman and its hitting the ground. The current way it slide for a few pixels before settling feels incompatible with the spheroidal nature of an apple but I still have to decide whether it will bounce-roll or just roll. Likely "just roll" will work better with slowing it down. Or maybe it should just keep rolling until off-screen or stopped by a wall ? 

Mais soyons clair: ça ne donne rien de convaincant avec une pomme sur le sol de la forêt. D'où l'idée que la pomme roule un peu en atterrissant ce qui 1) est fun et 2) lui donne un peu plus de portée qu'un projectile classique, ce qui est toujours le bienvenu dans un monde 1.

Alors tant qu'à faire dans le fun, on pourrait même laisser rouler la pomme jusqu'à ce qu'elle rencontre un obstacle, non ?

(En tous cas,  J.L.N approuve ... et apprécie le fix qui évite à Bilou de se retrouver figé dans un mur pendant qu'il nage) 

edit: The pull mask feature should allow me to make eyes and stem either in front of or behind the apple's "body" more easily. I had forgot it exist and made a messy animation where sprites are swapped, which makes it blink in the editor ^^"

Now, that simple animation opens up a lot of new options in terms of gameplay and interplay. What happens if an apple rolls into another apple ? and into a bopping funky funghi ? 

Game design brainstorm from 2022 suggested that you could "push" a funghi by throwing an apple at him when it's mid-air, but shouldn't it bounce the apple back at you if he's grounded ? and what if you're hit by an apple that's rolling back at you ? shouldn't that hurt ?

That starts making the appleman looking a bit more like a koopa and a bit less like a goomba, doesn't it ? My brother even suggested that it could be the core mechanics of a dedicated puzzle game ^_^

Ah. None of these are available yet, of course ^^"