Adapting Power-up design.

Here comes an old draft with a nice (?) sketch. 

There's a design decision dating back from 2001 for future Bilou games: to avoid using menus to "select a power" (thus move away from Megaman design) but rather having all of Bilou's super powers avaiable at all time, but potentially invoked by moves rather than mere button presses. Something much along the line of modern Kirby titles, although I'm not sure I had played "Amazing Mirror" yet. 

So when I thought about 'throw something further and faster than the average throw', I came up with a sort of 'straight throw dance' where the player would combine 'spin around Y axis' button (L) and repeat that to gain momentum before throwing the attack.

That might work when used in an explore-and-figure-out game, but for a game such as School Rush, this cannot be a good design. The time player has to make an attack move is short, and the game insists on you to move fast. At that rate, enforcing "down + B" for an attack effective against Pendats and "right + B" to release sponge bops would be unreasonably sophisticated, and thus error-prone.

Je voudrais que l'on puisse lancer des tailles-crayon plus fort, et surtout en ligne droite. Mais les projets étaient pour un jeu qui n'existe pas encore. Pour "School Rush", je ne vois pas cette idée aussi réussie. Ce serait un peu comme tenter de remplacer le menu de Megaman par des mouvements à la Street Fighter. Est-ce que ça donnerait un gameplay plus nerveux ? un meilleur rhytme ?

So even my "improved" plans for "straight throw" of DumbBladors (as opposed to gravity-affected throws) based on timing games cannot really match a power-up that makes the game simpler. If I want straight-throw in School Rush, I most likely want it as simple as regular throw. It could work, though in a game that is more exploration-oriented, with no externally-enforced timing, just like menu-ing works fairly when the levels are designed so that you don't have to juggle with items, but rather pick the few ones that work well within one zone (like in Zelda: Link Between Worlds).

Much along that line of thought, it could be good that the same (B) press that stuns a blador with BigPunch power-up also triggers "catch blador".