As I predicted, I've been really really busy the past week, and been working on our university's musical project about 12 hours every day. However, today I've had some time to work on the game, and there're only 2 rooms left to be done before I get to work on the next boss! Joyous.

I'd definitely want to donate, and I don't think donating means that we'd want to pay you for getting this 'product', but rather that we want to thank you for making it and giving a donation is the easiest way to actually show this in some (relatively) concrete way.

The original idea was to have a beefy particle effect going on, so maybe I should change the current particles into rubble/'energy' of sorts and then just have 5-6 recognizable pieces of the suit flying along with the rest?

Or maybe he just accidentally formed the sentence in a way that it could be interpreted as aggressive.

Let's not go there, folks! 

Thanks guys. Inspired me to do this:

I'll be extremely busy for about a week, so don't expect much new in regards of ESA. Sorry! However, in the meantime here's a nice pic just for you:



(I'm aware that it doesn't look all that underwater-y, but I'll add some plantlife there and all).

TI-84+ can't display color... can it?

TI-84+ displays some fantastic shades of green!

I guess I generally don't really care, but I guess I'll return the favour: from your description it seems to be a very very traditional low-res platformer. I don't mind that, but what does it do to stand out?

[Oh hey look it's Sunday]

Oh hey look it's Sunday

I have a feeling instead of trying to stand out he is just making it because he is enjoying doing so.

It looks great, no problems, but I always tend to do something a little different to make a game stand out and I wondered if he does so.

Unfortunately not really. While I usually enjoy experimenting, making a metroidvania has been in my mind for such a long time that I decided to make one just because, instead of really thinking of innovation.

EDIT: Although I obviously wont intentionally try to make this game a replica of Metroid. I hope I can manage to make the different areas feel fresh enough despite the obvious source of inspiration.

EDIT 2: As you probably noted from my comment in your devlog, I found the situation rather ironic, especially considering that you said that "I always tend to do something a little different to make a game stand out".

Thanks for the compliments!

mokesmoe: That actually looks much better than I thought it would. I may use such colouring for areas closer to the surface. However, due to ~atmosphere~  reasons I'll keep the deeper areas black.

The addition of just bubbles would help loads. Although, it already looks awesome. By the way, do you get any Jellyfish Juice from beating the jellyfish?

You do, but things brings a gameplay problem: there are no fireplaces in the game!

...But Ashkin is correct. The effect will affect either the whole thing or nothing.

Can't you give the individual BG tiles a different behavior? As in, move up and down like waves?

Technically I can, but mokesmoe nailed it; currently the effect is applied as a layer-specific overlay, and the only way to do it differently would be to make it local to every object; this wouldn't work due to them not lining up correctly (+ a couple other things that are caused by how MMF 2 works).

mokesmoe: Here's the full range of blue I have:


Note that the darkest one is already used in the walls in the underwater area. Also I think it'd look silly to have a coloured water but totally black interior areas.

I use Camstudio for recording, and then just edit the resulting .avi in a gif editor, saving it as a gif afterwards.

sublinimal: I fear you're right, but I really do like the wobble. I'll see what the ~playtesters~ say about it.

Curses! The ruse is up!

...But Ashkin is correct. The effect will affect either the whole thing or nothing. Also hi and thanks Blodyavenger!

Today I finished another mini-boss. It guards the aforementioned powerup.

(really confusing, yeah)

Next week I'm going to try to participate in 7DRL, so I wont promise progress, but we'll see! Adding the powerup shouldn't be a problem, so there's not much left to be done of the underwater sector!

EDIT: A tad better:

This does indeed look good, but the fish look like they're swimming in air because you can't tell there's water there. Maybe you should tint it, or add some bubbles floating up? Anyway, it's looking awesome!

I think this is a problem with
A) the fact that there's no parallax, and thus no sense of depth, and
B) the fact that due to limited colours, the water must be black along with the rest of the background.

I guess I'll add some kind of bubbles. Parallaxes have been in my mind a lot, as well!

Indeed I use the lame joke that is MMF 2.

On other notes, things are looking good again! I struggled a lot with the fact that mario-style swimming is really boring in this kind of a game, so I'm going to implement a powerup that makes swimming go smooth. This means that the underwater area will be a bit larger than first envisioned, but I don't mind that.

Also, large tubes were mentioned:

[I feel like a good tileset would definitely make it even better.]

Just the general feel of the game, I suppose. I feel like a good tileset would definitely make it even better. As is, it's great.

And you are wrong. So wrong.

how fucking stupid can you get

it's already the best looking roguelike, even among roguelikes with a tileset. there's no way a tileset would be able to look so awesome and colorful without becoming an unreadable mess.

I think he meant Dwarf Fortress, not DoomRL.

They're all cool and all, but unless you expand the topic a bit this would've belonged to the 'show us your pixel art' -thread. It's not really smart to do a new thread just for a single piece of pixely goodness (even though I admit that the PGC part is sweet).

I absolutely adore the looks of this, and I find it nice that instead of just posting mockups, you did what had to be done and started working on a game! I sure hope you get this finished for there can never be too many solid metroidvanias.

Also

Behold the glory of MSpaint.

Sorry about the lack of updates! I've finally begun to find a good structure for the underwater area, and am now adding all the necessary details to create it. I've been and will be ENORMOUSLY busy with school and stuff, so I can't really promise anything, but I think I might get to the next boss fight soonish.

Also the trailer music will be finished soonish! Herp derp.