Fall from Space Demo updated – v0.6

Another dev and demo update, within… months of the last! Unprecedented.

As the ROM size limits are almost hit now with Fall from Space, I’m focussing less on content additions currently and more on play throughs, and polishing what's in place. I’ve also had the fortune of getting some excellent feedback from Martin of 2nd Law Games who’s having a play through of it—If you haven’t checked out Self Simulated yet, do so, it’s a great example of a game that feels tight and just ‘good’ to control, often a challenge with GB Studio platforming projects (it’s also a brilliant game).

Fall from Space is a sprawling RPG and the platformer sections can feel.. somewhat clunky. While I could pass that off as ‘well, you are a robot made of metal’—and I may attempt to do so—I know it can be improved, so that’s part of what I’ll be focussing a lot on between now and its eventually release, I want these areas to feel just as fun as the other areas are.

So as well as adding in some extra bits of content to the water world of Los and a lot of work on a top secret for now feature, quite a few updates have been made that should improve the demo experience, set on the wasteland planet of Pandæmonium, these include –

• Hits and impacts feeling meatier with subtle camera shake
• Collisions less wonky, based on enemy direction not your direction, less chance of you ending up the wrong way now
• More responsive platforming, increased minimum jump height, quicker initial walk acceleration
• Menu lag massively reduced, I finally worked out a way to get rid of this hack that had been put in place to stop the UI dialogue refresh (once you’d been hit, collected a coin etc), clashing with the menu dialogue being called up.
• + a ton of misc minor bug fixes, dialogue tweaks and some additional sign posting/clues for quests and items
• Also...

New stepping system

The (quite complex behind the scenes) rolling system you probably didn't use, has been substantially reworked. Rolling has multiple purposes in Fall from Space –

• Roll under obstacles
• Timed rolls to evade projectiles
• Roll away from enemy close combat
• Roll back after enemy close combat

The problem is the latter two all require different spacing, depending on enemy AI. Some enemies will advance towards and into you like maniacs, some enemies will stop telegraph an attack and then strike out.

You can roll away to avoid a strike, but when rolling forward to counter, great if the enemy has stopped to shoot or attack, but if they’re advancing into you, then you’ll roll into them. Added to this you can upgrade your speed/roll over the course of the game.

Needless to say – one roll doesn’t fit all.

I had an idea how to fix this that rolled out in the last demo, rolling forward directly after a roll back carried out a short ‘countering’ roll. Which in theory worked, but the window you had to input this directly limited how quickly you could string rolls together, and stopped rolls being seamless (which sucked for the Dojo mini game). It was fiddly to pull off and it wasn’t even very clear when you pulled it off, visually. 

Also, what a pain to try and explain to the player.

I’ve reworked this instead by adding an additional move, ‘stepping’.

Holding down attack and pressing a direction, forward or back, will have you dash back or forward a couple steps. This plays a different animation—made up of existing frames, I don’t have the luxury of spare frames unfortunately—but it feels distinct and it allows you to strike, dash back to avoid the opponents strike, then dash forward to counter. Separating itself from the rolling system and being used purely for combat.

So, a lot of waffling, but you now have –

• Up and Down, roll forwards and backwards
• Punch + Up and Down, step forward and step backwards

I think it feels pretty good and certainly makes combat less fiddly.