Started experimenting with giving the four players small, small differences. See if you can spot them!
hahah I've always thought it was a mouth too XD
maybe the eyes are what is making it seem a bit cutesy. in the sprite version the eyes look so EMPTY, like "I've seen some shit".
Lol!
Yeah, wanna get to that empty stare...
Somehow, I have never seen this project until now. I just read through the first 18 pages + the last few, and I'm feeling a little blown away.
The effects look great, from the hanging chains and wires to the light bloom that you have in some pics. Gameplay of course looks amazing as everyone has pointed out, I love how the animation blends into the actual mechanics, which look very fun in their own right.
I think the decision to go with a hub world won't have as many downsides as you predict (or at least, predicted). Maybe the time of day and such won't be able to change, but by manipulating the tile set you can still get a feeling of progression - one area is more or less stony/industrialized/etc.
Also, I tried the runnMaze2 demo, but it seemed kind of glitchy. I couldn't figure out how to jump with either player (tried all the usual candidates), and with the brown character, movement was mapped to ESDF instead of WASD, which - if intentional - seems very, very unwise.
On a final side note, it turns out a game I've been working on for the past month-ish is very similar to this, with the notable exception that yours is far better. :/ Oh well, I guess it will give me some ideas on how to make my game, ie, avoiding the stuff you're already doing - I don't want to make a total ripoff.
edit: Jump is K/Q? Why...
Sorry about the unconventional choice of keys... When I made that thing I was too lazy to look up the key codes for stuff like shift and control, so I mapped all the controls to letter keys instead
The actual game has customizable controls.
I know that the game is feeling a little bit hacky, and that's sadly just the consequence of me not being the best programmer and my software being old and limited. This game will be far from perfect, but I hope people will be able to look past the sometimes amateurish execution and appreciate the things I have accomplished and am proud of. To me just making a game is an accomplishment in itself, be it with glitches and hacks.
On the hub world stuff I've solved it in a strange way - there's an area in the middle of the map that's underground. Around it are different areas, with different sun/weather conditions. You can't pass from one area to another without passing through the underground area. That way different times of day/weather conditions can exist, but you never have the super-obvious thing where you go from one screen to the next and the weather changes, as the underground always works as a buffer. It's a stretch, I know, but I have high expectations on my audience's willing supspencion of disbelief
I wish you the best of luck on your project, and am much looking forward to seeing what you're up to. Will you be starting a devlog any time soon?
This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen, why have I not heard of it until today?!
All the animations are so smooth and delicious!
By the way, I read way earlier in the thread that lizards do a sort of head vibrate with particle effects to indicate they heard something? If they still do that, why not make them cock their head up and listen,
?
That sounds way more readable.
Thank you! When it comes to the body language of lizards, I too would like for it to be subtle like that, and believe me, I'm the first one to get involved in tiny little details! However we're talking about very small sprites here, and when a player is moving around they're not currently looking at the lizards, but at their own avatar. I had to make what's going on in the lizards' heads more loud and obvious, why I added the particle effect. That said, a lizard that hears a sound will change the angle of its head and freeze for a moment before setting off to investigate.