July 16, 2012
Trudging
A couple of hours of work on Ninja Tree, some wasted time struggling with Stencyl, got a system working for spawning enemies so I can actually design a level now ... so nothing exciting to report, but some useful progress behind the scenes.
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July 10, 2012
Thinking about shooter design
Thinking abstractly, a shooter has two main activities:
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- shooting enemies or other targets
- dodging or otherwise dealing with hazards (enemy shots, possibly walls, etc.)
Usually, if you do well at activity #1, shooting enemies, that results in fewer enemy shots, making activity #2 more manageable. Let's look at each activity in more detail.
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July 06, 2012
Ninja Tree day 5
Added a second shot type, which can be sword-blocked although not reflected. Second enemy type, trying the idea of taking lots of shots, but only one reflected enemy shot. That works well.
Set a slight delay before shooting and swording as in S&P 2 (see below). Fiddled with parameters. The control feels pretty good now, so I'll leave it alone for a while.
Currently trying the idea of being able to destroy enemy shots with your shots. Not sure about it so far. It may make the action too focused on your shooting.
Overall, it's getting a lot more fun. I'm excited.
My next post will be an attempt to hash out the design ideas I'm going for here. I'm hoping that will help me focus on useful directions. I've realized that moving and dodging is a much larger part of typical shooters than I realized (and I already considered it a large part), therefore making a shooter with no moving is trickier than I expected. Next time I'll try to express some ideas for making fun situations and interesting (action) choices....
[UPDATE] Updated the online work-in-progress build, although it's currently more of a work-in-progress-in-progress (too easy).
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July 03, 2012
Sin & Punishment 2 -- control study
I had been dissatisfied with the control feel in Ninja Tree so far, so I fired up Sin and Punishment: Star Successor for a bit of research. So here's how it works in Treasure's masterpiece.
(Really, if you haven't played it, go order a copy now. It's like playing a master class in game design.)
When you shoot (hold the trigger), there's a slight delay before shooting begins. This is interesting because I didn't remember any delay; I would have sworn that you shoot instantly. Even more interesting, there's also a delay on your sword (press and release trigger), which I definitely never noticed until I looked at it carefully.
Because there's a delay at the start of both primary actions, switching between shooting and sword-swinging has a cost. Whenever you switch, you lose a bit of attacking time. This adds interest to the fundamental fighting action (even if the player isn't consciously aware of it, as I wasn't until I studied it just now).
There's another important limit on the player's actions, and this one I had noticed before. With your sword, you're limited to three swings at a time, and there's a brief (under a second) cooldown afterwards before you can start shooting or moving again. So if you haul out your max sword combo, you'll be vulnerable afterwards. This is an important tradeoff that makes the "sword" decision more interesting for the player. (With no limit or cooldown, you could just spam sword continuously and be mostly invincible.)
These are both good design elements that I will borrow for Ninja Tree and see how it works.
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June 30, 2012
Ninja Tree day 4
Got some nice Ninja Tree work time in today. So far, Ninja Tree's got his/her/its leaf shots and branch/sword swing. Random enemies randomly throw axes at you, which you can sword back at them. I'll put up my first work-in-progress build for anyone interested:
(click for sword, hold down mouse to fire)
I'm not satisfied with the sword/fire control. If I put a delay before you start firing, firing feels sluggish. If not, then in order to separate sword and shoot, which I want to separate, I have to cancel the bullet if the player used sword, which is sometimes noticeable and odd. Any shorter of a click length and it gets hard to use the sword reliably, which is bad. I'll have to go back and play some more Sin and Punishment (oh, darn) and study how they do it.
More troublingly, it's not as fun as I had expected at this stage. I think it may help to add different types of enemies and generate enemies with more of a pattern rather than the current random trickle.
- enemies that try to run into you
- shots that can be sword-blocked, but not reflected
- enemies that take lots of leaf hits, but are defeated with one reflected shot
- [UPDATE] shots that aren't aimed at you, so you have to decide which shots to deal with
- make reflected shots clear out other shots
Other things to try:
- try letting you destroy enemy shots with your leaf shots
- try making it so you're defending trees on the left against enemies coming from the right
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June 27, 2012
Ninja Tree day 3
A few more minutes today. Enemies now throwing axes, which are targeted directly at the player (after solving a brief gotcha with degrees vs. radians), although they currently bounce off without doing anything....
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09:46 PM
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June 26, 2012
Ninja Tree day 2
(30 minutes) Added placeholder enemies, started coding behaviors for giving and receiving damage....
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June 25, 2012
A Ninja Tree approaches!
Back from mini-vacation, on to project #2. Main ideas here:
- Shooting game
- but the player can't move
- you can shoot enemy shots out of midair
- and maybe use a limited short-range move to reflect enemy shots a la Sin and Punishment
Obviously, it's a game about a tree who is a ninja (or possibly vice-versa). So far, just getting started with some placeholder art and firing shots towards the mouse, with nothing happening yet.
(Can I finish something playable by the end of the month for NaGaDeMo (which for me is more like NaGaDe5Days)? We'll see!)
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June 17, 2012
Space Junk Cleanup -- Done!
Okay, another hour of tinkering, and NOW it's done for real.
So, about 6 hours grand total (I didn't keep careful track). Note that I had the basic concept working in one hour, and the rest was trying out additions and changes, and various fixes and fine-tuning. This is roughly how things went:
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June 16, 2012
More Space Junk Cleanup
It's been a week since I posted? That won't do at all. I spent another couple hours on Space Junk Cleanup, and finished it as much as I care to. Will upload and discuss tomorrow.... zzzz....
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June 08, 2012
Space Junk Cleanup -- Jam O'Clock project
I heard of the Jam O'Clock challenge organized by Andy Moore -- in short, make a game in an hour, to try out an idea and see if it works. I decided to give it a shot. I went with the optional theme of DEVOUR (which required dropping my original idea and thinking up a new idea just before challenge start). Without further ado:
I'm not sure the idea is worth pursuing, but I'll probably work a bit more enough to finish my original ideas for it, mainly having hazardous junk mixed in with the yummy junk, and maybe some kind of charge shot thingy.
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More Stencyl
Not much time lately, but tinkered with my practice Breakout game a bit more to make it more like the Chapter 3 solution intended. Good practice with the Stencyl programming system, had some fun. Made the blocks shoot balls down at you, because why not. I actually kinda like the idea of bouncing enemy shots back at them to fight, might explore it some more....
Still got my concerns from last time in the back of my head, but having fun for now.
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June 06, 2012
Learning Stencyl
So I've been tinkering around with Stencyl lately. It looks like a promising platform for making games, mostly for the apparent ease of cross-publishing to Flash and iOS. Its most distinctive feature is how you drag together "blocks" to write code rather than, you know, typing. So far, I find it awkward to put together simple expressions, but I'm sure that will get faster. There doesn't seem to be a clean way to make temporary local variables, which bothers me.
Having just tackled the basic Breakout game in Stencylpedia Chapter 3, I'm alarmed by an apparent oddity in the collision system. Stencyl's collision system is based on the physics system, and the design of the Stencyl engine seems to assume that you'll want physics to affect all your objects. Well, maybe not. For Breakout, you don't want the ball to push the paddle down. You can set the paddle object to not be pushed, but this makes the paddle not be stopped by the solid tiles of the wall either. This is the part where I started really giving Stencyl the Perry Mason stare. I'm still learning, so maybe there are satisfactory solutions waiting, or maybe this behavior will turn out to be not such a big deal, but I'm at this point I'm concerned....
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