Post by abhimonk in PLANET D4RK comments

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I'm gonna write this as I read it as well cause I love this stream of consciousness stuff. I am vehemently pro-brainfuzz so this is all good for me.

(Update: oh god I typed up a wall of text as well, no pressure to read the whole thing)

Glad you're trying out love2D! I totally agree, it gets out of the way and just feels so fast to use. It takes a little setup to get the traditional game engine features but goddamn once you have your basic game systems written, the content just flows from your fintertips. Never tried love2d with typescript but I'm pretty sure there's a pure JS port of the api somewhere that you could use typescript with.

Glad you liked the title music, that was my friends' favorite track. The blocky title text is something I need to grow out of, it's kind of my lazy shortcut to making a title screen haha!

The cape is most certainly my Celeste obsession coming through, but also procedural capes are probably gonna be a staple in my games from now on. It makes the movement pop so much more, I feel like I'm gonna put capes and hair in everything I work on from now on.

Woof sorry you fell off the map in 1-7, that can happen in a couple places. The colliders try their best to shove you out but if you get too deep, you get shoved off the map. I really need to add some global killbox if you leave the map. Glad the reset came in handy here.

Sorry about the camera feeling slow when you fall, I feel that too. I usually have manual camera transitions wherever it matters, but 1-7 is somewhere I should have one of those so you don't fall blindly at the end.

Hahah 4-4 was 100% Celeste-inspired.

I'm glad you liked the cutscenes, especially the last one. This is definitely the most writing I've done for a game, and I wanted to tell a story that felt realistic and empathetic. I'm glad you liked the story!

I'm also really happy you felt the difficulty was manageable, I'm always paranoid that my games will be too hard for anyone to finish haha! I definitely hear you on the slash-related frustrations, related to slashing the wrong blobs.

Thanks a ton for the kind words on the music. I'm really happy with the way it all came out. Like you said, I think I'm starting to hit a sweet spot with my instrumentation; For a long time it felt like I'd just throw instruments at the wall and hope something stuck. Nowadays, my selection process for plugins/vsts is much more methodical and feels more cohesive.

Also thanks for the kind words on the art! This game was probably my hardest art project to this date (and my next game will probably be 1bit just to have a break from grinding aseprite haha); I think this is the first time I've ever actually shipped a game with an actual background and tilesets.

Thanks for the feedback on the clarity, I totally hear you. One thing I'm still trying to figure out is how to actually separate important things from 'background' things as far as art goes. There's also definitely a ton of VFX, a "low" vfx option is a great idea, something I'll definitely include in a future game (and maybe update this game with if I get time). I love downwell, I'll definitely revisit it to see how it does clarity! The text is another thing I need to work on too, I think the text scrolls pretty fast and I totally agree that it'd be hard for some to read.

I'm glad the game didn't feel like a celeste ripoff! That was one thing I was worried about, so I'm glad it felt like it could stand on its own. The Katana zero influence is mostly the slash visuals + some of the later enemy fights (Katana zero has 1 hit kills for the player and enemy, so a lot of combat in that game involves dying a lot until you come up with the 'perfect route' for a kill).

I haven't played move or die, and I'm not sure what mental checkpoint is unfortunately! The zxc+arrow keys controls were just popular requests from my last gamejam game.

Let me know if you give speedrunning this a try! My friends have had a good time speedrunning it; My PB is not deathless so there's definitely time to be saved.

Ah shit I typed up a wall of text as well.

Thanks a ton for playing and for all the feedback. I love hearing from you and reading your walls of text. As far as development goes, I crunched a little bit at the end of this game because I started getting sick of the codebase and wanted to finish before my classes got more busy, but it definitely felt pretty relaxed to develop!

Thanks again for playing and for stopping by!

Wistpotion3 years ago(+1)

More on music (music has become a big passion for me during the last two years), I think checking out DDRKirby might be a good idea. They have a 9-bit style, so it's pretty close to what you make, but with just a bit more modern instrumentation and use of FX. The sort of fit in with how chiptune sounds in my head. They have full on videos of when they make the songs, and they are super fast, most songs are done in an hour or a bit more.

Cape! I just thought it's funny it works so well, the cape is like the 2d equivalent of cloth and hair simulations, which generally work pretty meh. So it's cool it's working and that you might continue with it!

And about falling through the map, I guess that is more of a problem with löve than anything you can really deal with, if you used their system. I'm really happy they have it though, physics (mainly collision detection and handling) isn't something I think is fun to write, so it's a big plus. Will have to figure out how to actually use it first though. It's a nice change of pace compared to godot and unity where they are so complex it's hard to figure out where to actually start on a new system.

About move or die and mental checkpoint. I think they are called those awesome guys, and they have a big thing for button prompts, and making propts immediately switch to the right controller when someone begins using another one. That's why I was a bit curious.

Getting sick of the codebase, I feel that. That's a reason why a lot of games I make never get finished. Need to get better at structuring code in ways that don't end up hitting me in the back of the head. Also a big reason why I want to use typescript, it let's you write documentation right in the code, which helps immensely so you don't have to sit and figure out what the system you made 3 weeks ago does. So it might be worth a peek, it helps in just keeping you from making stupid mistakes like putting in a string where it should be a float and so on. Autocompletion and refactoring works really well in it as well.

And good luck on future projects, 1-bit art can be really cool as well, so I'll be eagerly waiting to see what you come up with heh.

abhimonk3 years ago

I'll check DDRKirby out, thanks for the rec!

Also haha I actually wrote custom physics/collision for this game and TRYH4RD, because I was in gamejam mode when I first wrote my systems code and forgot to check if Love2D had physics already. I should probably switch to the Love2D physics/collision stuff eventually (I think it's just a wrapper around Box2D) since it'd be faster and better tested.

I feel like getting sick of a codebase for me is inevitable towards the end of a project. The cleaner my initial code is, the longer I can stave off that feeling, but so far with my projects they almost always end with pure spaghetti code. That could just be burnout too though, so it definitely varies.

I made a game that I ended up never releasing last year with a custom JavaScript engine (which I ended up porting to TypeScript later on as an exercise); It's definitely super easy to use, and the lack of type checking in lua definitely bites me a decent amount. If you end up using lua for your next game and Love2D, I highly recommend the EmmyLua VS Code extension (if you use VSCode), it gives you autocomplete for all your custom lua code which was a lifesaver in this project.

Good luck with your future stuff as well! Always looking forward to what you put out!

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