Here's at last the demonstration of game engine improvement and new graphics for the School Zone, on a temporary soundtrack by Cyborg Jeff.There's no "gameplay" or "mission" yet: you can navigate through a single map, bop sponges and dumbladors and track bugs (there sure are some). The ink doesn't hurt yet, but the baddies do. How many roll-jump can you chain ?
New features:- better animations with AnimEDS
- transition animation (in jumps, mostly)
- improved parallax scrolling
- Bilou may pause at the end of a downward slope. Just release the DPAD and move forward again.
- Bilou may get stuck in corners. I need to figure how and why.
- Dumbladors can be trapped mid air.
- If the bottom screen turns pink, you've entered debug mode -- known as InspectorWidget. Press 'L' trigger for frame-by-frame game or hold 'L' and press 'START' again to resume "normal" gaming.
- if all you can see is "efs:/strtrk.xm not found" on black background, you're using an incompatible linker or emulator. If you're using desmume, you need to add "--gbaslot-rom=self" on the command line.
Oh, this is the 700th post, by the way ^_^
vu sur dev-fr.org, et - chose amusante - c'est aussi mon 700eme post sur dev-fr (et ça, je jure que c'est pas fait exprès :P)
edit: just understood and fixed the slope issues.
Hey, really great blog btw. Demo looks good in motion. The book platform mechanic works well, and actually the woodblocks don't feel that out of place, ha.
ReplyDeleteBugs 'n stuff: I did run into the corner & downwards slope bugs but other than that I just feel like I could be more mobile; I was really missing a run button and the little pauses and lack of inertia take away from the fluidity. I'd like to bounce and slide more.
Thanks for your feedback, Facet. I'll definitly work on a RUN mechanic asap, but I want to be able to GRAB and SHOOT dumbladors into other monsters first ^_^
ReplyDeleteglad you liked the blog as a whole, too ;) corner&slopes bugs should be fixed in the version packaged in "SchoolTest-smooth.zip", btw. I just figured it out a few day after the "official release", so I updated the link here. Is that the version you've been testing ?
ReplyDeleteOh, and while there's no RUN button, landing after a jump while keeping the DPAD in some direction make you walk at twice the speed (don't ask why ... yet).
Sorry for the late reply. It was the first version; no slope issues with the new one :).
ReplyDeleteAh, I see you've already planned out the mobility stuff, gameplay mechanics are definitely more important, I'm just impatient :D I spent quite a while browsing back through the development process here, enjoyed the breakdowns of inspirations etc too.
Couple of little graphical things I noticed this time: when walking into corners on the right the falling anim. is triggered repeatedly (just pauses going into the left), Bilou peeks through the mask on the ringbinders where overlapped with the ruler and sometimes on landing whilst holding forwards a single misalinged frame is flashed behind him (this seems to happen every time when the jump is checked by a low ceiling).
@facet: thanks. I managed to reproduce the animation bugs you mention, and I've got some clue why they appear this way. I'll investigate these.
ReplyDeleteAs for the ringbinders, I have unfortunately much less options: I use two layers of graphics, (in front of and behind Bilou, statically defined), and when I want two objects to overlap, one cannot stay in front of Bilou. my options are either to push the ruler behind, or make the binder wider.