Let's do this.
[ Famicase design by Kristian Spears | @tephrael ]
~Stealth rolls, sabotage, hush 'em up! Join the littlest ninja named Bel and her lazy pistol Poppy as they infiltrate the Arcology to shush the rowdy Yottabyte Gang and save the Librarian!~
Of course, the sprites I've created for Poppy are way too large to be used for gameplay. I'm planning to implement them as UI elements at the top of the screen.
Working in 2D, the challenge with Poppy will be to communicate to the player that the face is actually on the front of the pistol.
This might seem obvious if you're familiar with the cartridge design, but not everyone will see that before they play. Just looking at the image above on its own is confusing.
To address this, I went back to the doodle above where I used an isometric view. By including this additional information in the portrait, it's much easier to see that they are two views of the same object:
Completed the final pass on the sprite design for Bel:
Since I'm terrible at pixel art, I turned to one of my favourite Super Famicom games: Magical Pop'n. The character animations in that game are fantastic, and they were used as inspiration for Bel's basic movements. There's still a lot left to do here, but the following animations are in the books:
Since the engine and collision code are up and running, here's a demo:
Next up:
Stay tuned.
Now featuring:
With that, the core platforming engine is just about done. Lots of work to get the collisions and animations working properly. Still a few bugs to squash but it's functional, and feels good.
Another day, another gif:
The camera system is just about where I want it for now. It's a basic threshold-style camera with two tracking speeds and a slight forward-facing bias. There's a generous vertical deadzone to avoid up-and-down camera wiggling. Might need some tweaking, but we'll save that for later once we have some actual levels to play around in. For now, it will do.
The next couple of days will be spent fleshing out actual content. For now, a quick progress update:
"ughh... wake up, Poppy!"
All I can say is that it takes a lot of fiddling...
Regarding platformer game feel (and collision code specifically), I've learned a ton from Zack Bell's website:
Understanding Collision Basics - Part 1
Understanding Collision Basics - Part 2
Sadly, the open source code for his excellent game INK is no longer available as far as I know.
In any case, getting collision detection right is definitely important. Once the basic engine is up and running, it's a matter of tuning player acceleration, jump height, air control, gravity and friction by trial and error until it feels right for the game.
The only real advice I can give is to adjust one thing at a time. If you look at my first gif, the character couldn't even jump yet, because I wanted to tune the ground acceleration and friction before adding any vertical movement. Same goes for everything else -- don't add double jumps or wall jumps until regular jumps are solid, and so on.
Hope that helps!
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Here's a recording taken while playing around with some of these mechanics (most are only semi-functional -- just experimenting with the interactions to see how things feel):
Thanks for the kind words and feedback! It definitely takes extra effort to post updates, but I find it helps keep things on track. You can step back and make sure you're not too far down a rabbit hole wasting time on something unimportant. Having said that, I still waste lots of time on unimportant things, so I guess I also have much to learn...
Well, even after multiple passes through the cutting room, this turned out to be a much larger project than anticipated.
Here are a couple of animations showing how the final game looks.
This will be the last post before the game drops later this week. Further development & patch notes will be found in the DevLog.
Thanks to everyone who has been following along so far. I really hope you enjoy the game and I look forward to hearing your feedback!
