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[I_smell]

Trying to come up with a design for the main mech. BOY DO I SURE SUCK!



I'm just kinda flailing around right now. All I know is that I want it to be top-heavy, because the main character is a bear, and the game feels all heavy and impactful. Also I guess I want it to be red? Not sure. This is really difficult. I need some direction on machinery or vehicles or aircraft...
I think it's gonna be 3D art eventually.

Also hey, am I comin to the wrong place to talk about videogames? Cos what always happens with my threads is that it's just me talking to myself for 2 weeks, and maybe one other guy every once in a while. Are my games just boring?
I feel like I could talk all day about how to do upgrades, making a Horde Mode in a scrolling shooter, co-op weapons, all different enemy types that drain you and poison you n throw stuff around, but every time I come back a thread it's always sunk right down to about Page 3!

[I_smell]

Update:





everything still sucks

[I_smell]

I want this other character to be a famous #1 space pilot, who becomes very jealous as you become the new hot topic and he devolves into an angry whimpy baby.



I definately want him in a skinny white jumpsuit, but I'm still lost on what I want him to look like. I started leaning into a tall blocky Woody from Toy Story, then I spun into a stubby spikey angry Vegeta, then I watched some cartoons and completely fell on my ass. So I guess I'll come back to it later.

I think I want him to have a pointy chin, and I think I want him to have a long nose.
Not touched the gameplay for a while. Weird, right?

[Greg Game Man]

Good to see you working on something new, the weapons are awesome, your coding has improved a lot!

I'm hoping this game has a unifying theme and feel to it, some of your older work has some fairly random locations/characters, making it hard to be absorbed into the world.

edit: a pro technique for character design is to do tons of black silhouettes, trying out lots of different weight/shapes, then choose your favorites and do some vague detail work with a white brush - then choose favorites and go into colors/fine details

[I_smell]

yaaaaaaayyyy somebody cares

Coming up with a solid game world and style was definately something I wrote down before I started. Most games are just made up as I'm going, and No Time To Explain was especially a god-damn mess in that regard.
This is why I'm doing a tonne of concept stuff now, to make sure I've got a CONCRETE idea of what I'm doing before I dive in. I wrote down a plan of what happens in Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3, and I'm splitting those into what happens on individual levels now.
It's still a goofy cartoon, but now all the characters and enemies are part of a really neat little story with a beginning, middle and end.
I'd write what it's all about, but then this post would look like a wall of text and nobody'd read it.

I drew this to help communicate what I'm aiming for:

I think I'll draw more scenes like that soon.

Anyway while I was outlining what happens on all these levels I realised I need way more enemy types. So I got more ambitious with what I was doing:


These guys are regular shoot dudes, EXCEPT they have 2 interesting states:
If you grab one, you'll hold him facing the opposite way. So you can use him as a weapon.
If there's a storm ball onscreen, they'll all gravitate towards it. This means you can't get close to them without being electrocuted, and also it makes their fire more concentrated and dangerous.
Enemies that have relationships with other enemies is FUCKING COOL!! I can't wait to have robots who combine like a megazord, or enemies who infect each other or whatever. Fastball special.
Here's something I did with that concept:



These guys are 30 little bots who will seek eachother out and bite onto eachother's tails to form one long snake. They're invincible when connected, but otherwise have pretty low health. Also they're more dangerous when connected cos they take up more of the screen.

Now I just need to keep my head on straight and decide when something's genuinely cool, and when it's just programmer-cool.

[Dane]

You'd better finish this, man.

YOU'D BETTER!

[I_smell]

I've not started it yet, this is still the Flash prototype I guess.

I've still not told my producer anything about this game, cos then we'll launch into solid production-time. Once we do that then I'll HAVE to finish it, as my job. So I'm still too scared to do that lol.

That's why updates are so slow.

[Jay Tholen]

A few weeks ago I started a small game called Space Puncher. It's a little different in that your guy is a social outcast because he was born with freakishly large hands, but it still has punching in space. We may share a wavelength.

That said, this one is almost entirely different and I love it. Brilliant weapon design, and the enemies are looking great.

[Nektonico]

Its nice, but the flamethrower weapon is kinda pointless, and the homing clusterbombs thing is overpowered i think.

[character]

Subscribed. Love where this is going.

Like:
- Player following the mouse
- Shooting AND slashing (double bonus of awesome right there)
- The flying group of stick men that stay on you but don't overwhelm the player at the same time


Not Like:
- Middle mouse button for the weapon wheel. Would rather see this mapped to ctrl or somewhere else that is convenient on the keyboard


Keep up the great work!

[ANtY]

for the rival guy consider a purple suit instead of white 

[I_smell]

Why's that?

I'm still figuring things out, but I've bin guessing so far that the earth forces are blue/green, the mars forces are red/orange and the aliens are pink/purple.
But that's just off the top of my head.

[Chris Pavia]

[I_smell]

I WISH I had more time to work on this, but I had to catch up on work in the week, and sadly I had to hang out with real friends on the weekend.
So WITH THE UTMOST OF SHAME I'm updating with one new enemy type:


(one of these animations pauses as a glitch, so fuckin gimme a break)

This enemy holds a shield. It makes them very durable and they take a lot of damage. They stand infront of smaller enemies deliberately to protect them when they aren't focusing on you. That was a pretty hard thing to code- and hopefully this'll pop up out of Flash eventually, so someone else is gonna have to figure it out later.

You can brute-force through their shield, or you can do the smart thing and attack when they lower the shield.

Or you can do the REALLY smart thing and grab the shield out of their hand to protect yourself.
And then throw it back at them.

That's kind of over-powered, but it's also a really cool thing to accidentally figure out, so I'm keeping it in. It wasn't accidentally coded in, obviously, that was a deliberate idea.
Hopefully at this point you're all getting why I hate bullet-hells and why I'm making this.

If you've got any good ideas, as always, throw em at me.

[ANtY]

Nice, sketchy feeling from this game, definitely like it 

[character]

That's pretty rad. Can't wait for another exe to play around with it some more! 

[I_smell]

I'd post a playable update, but I dunno, the game's just a blank room with a couple enemies in it right now. It's not a level.

Current enemy-type count: TEN!

That's enough, right? No, I know it isn't. I'm gonna need SO MANY tricks in this game to flesh it out enough for people to put money down.

I went back to an old challenge I always go back to, and that's the Devil May Cry 4 Blood Palace and OH MY GOD!! I totally remembered why those are my fuckin favourite games ever. So many cool small ideas about how to do charge weapons, why grabs are fun, snapping guys in half, kicking the hot galactic christ out of everyone.

So, I'm gonna admit, this enemy is basically an enemy from that
But hey this is a shooter, so it's different. And you can freeze this guy with an ice weapon to stop him. Someone commented on the video though, maybe this'll be too hard for people who aren't playing the same way I am? I've bin using a tablet pen as a mouse for ages...

It feels like I'm spamming, sorry.
I'm gonna keep doin it til someone writes a bigger post than me, just a heads up. Or until someone notices I should've put this in Devlogs.

OH-- AND JUST TO REMIND EVERYONE: This is programmer art. This isn't how I actually draw games.

[Tynan]

Nice to see this still coming along.

I actually kind of like the style of this game.

The only thing I would really pick out that bothers me is the direct mouse-driven control scheme and the pause-weapon wheel interface. The mouse control makes the game feel really cheap and artificial. You don't really have to plan a path because you can flick around so weirdly fast. The weaponwheel is a brutal flow breaker in an action game. I would really consider switching to WASD+number keys for weapons.

Other than that, some of the really extreme camera shakes are disorienting in a bothersome way.

Just a few thoughts from a passerby.

[I_smell]

I agree that being tied to the mouse makes it feel like a Flash 5 game from ten years ago. Or like a custom cursor or something. It's a shame that mouse controls have that automatic stigma, but it's THE fastest and most accurate way to move around.
I hate the keyboard more than I hate the mouse though, the idea of gliding around in straight lines with arrow keys and pressing A & S to attack (or J & K) I think would feel like EVEN MORE of a web game, to me. That'd feel way more artificial than clicking on guys to bash them.
Hopefully, in my mind, people will spaz around with the mouse and zig-zag up n down for the first 10 minutes- and then just forget about it and play the game. Then say "Oh, I get why this uses the mouse now, because the freedom of moving at whatever speed you want is fun". HOPEFULLY.
I do recognize that that's a thing people feel weird about though.
And you can get hit, and have to be careful about where you run, and all the regular stuff games like this have anyway, so don't worry about that.

And I'm having controller input aswel, in the final game. Cos people always ask fr that.
Also you're right! I should tie weapons to the numpad. I don't play PC games, so I would'nt have noticed that. The Mass Effect weapon wheel is fun to me, but yep, there should be a keyboard button for that aswel.

I really like the camera shake, but I'm starting to notice that it kind-of shakes YOU around, and kind-of makes your weapons really inaccurate... so I should alter that.

[character]

I feel you on the tablet. I had a much better experience with that than with the mouse. I use that thing for almost everything. Anyways, yeah, hotkeys for the guns or maybe a hotkey for the pop-up window wherever the mouse is would be a good alternative too.

Digging the shield guys. That video makes it look like they would be a great mini-boss/encounter type deal like halfway through a level or something.

That new teleporting enemy is pretty rad too. I like how hectic the battle looks and nice touch with the freezing