Day 6
Another busy day, but guess what? I fixed jumping! There are still a few quirks, but the big one (wherein the player launches straight into the air and clings to the ceiling as long as the jump key is held and they are colliding with a tile) is gone so it is mostly functional. Ideally, I'll have time towards the end of the jam to implement a smoother means of jumping (that considers how long the jump key is pressed, among other things) and work out other quirks.
Now that the (majority) of the player's movement has been implemented though, I can start working on implementing power-ups and some level design. So yesterday I made sprites for three of the four power-ups I plan on building the game around.
First, we have Red Magic, which will behave like the missile upgrade in Metroid games (in that it is used as a projectile attack and as a means of getting past certain barriers). Next is the Magic Shield, which will act as a, well, shield, and also allow players to navigate underwater more easily. Then we have the Magic Lantern, which illuminates dark areas and dispels illusions. You can think about it as a combination of Super Metroid's x-ray beam and Zelda's Lens of Truth. And finally, the upgrade for which I have not yet made a sprite--the Magic Cloak, which will improve Mari's defense and grant her the hi-jump ability.
I plan on beginning to implement these this weekend in addition to also figuring out how to use Stencyl's unofficial dialog extension. Normally, this would be something I would want to figure out how to implement myself, but the extension seems really robust and customizable and I don't want to waste too much time figuring out dialog since it's kind of a secondary feature for the prototype right now. In the proper game, I want to scatter notes and world building things all over for the player to pick up and read. And I maybe want to have NPCs? I'm not quite sure yet. I've also been thinking a lot about how to make a map system and I have some ideas I may or may not get to. We'll see.
As always, thank you for reading! :')