@christian, I like your ideas. The spear could definitely be made more of a multi-tool. Already it's possible to lodge it in a wall and use it for climbing, but your idea for rigging it as a pole and trick lizards to drop on to it is awesome as well. The core of the game is to have few things, but explore many interactions between them, and more functionality for the spear certainly fits in that theme.
@Keo, thanks for being interested! We've been talking a lot about the font stuff in the thread already. I know your frustration, it's like "gaah! He's making a cool game, but then he has to go wrong with this one choice and mess it up! Doesn't he understand the art he himself is creating!?" and I've felt that way many times too... Thing is, there isn't really anything I can say that will make you go "AHA! In
that case, the font is awesome!" Here's my attempt to explain, at least, from the last time this was brought up.
Klick the quote
Short version is that I'm not trying to create something "artsy", or maybe I am, but in that case it's going to have its roots firmly planted in cartoons, graffiti and pop culture. In order to create some kind of weird contrast, that will make it feel even more desolate. It's probably not going to work, and it's going to be frustrating as hell to whatch me ruin what could have been a super atmospheric game, but well, I've gotta try to do what I want to do
If the failure is too crazily big I might go with a "gritty" typography instead, it's never too late to give up~
@James, yeah, I've found a way to keep it reasonable, which is that spears and rocks still
stun when they hit the head, they just don't do much
damage. That way a spear is almost guaranteed to get you out of a tricky lizard situation, because you can smack it in the face and leave in the ensuing confusion.
And yeah, I know it's not easy
Good thing with making it a little harder though, is that the excitement/processing power index goes up, as fewer lizards pose more of a challenge. Now 2 or 3 of them is quite enough for me to try to fend of, while earlier I had kind of a walk in the park with 4 of them at the same time, which was tougher on the computer.
it seems to take at least 2-3 spears (or a thorough pummeling with rocks and things THEN a spear) to take down a lizard...
This is something I've changed now (or fixed, as it was more or less a bug). Lizards were never supposed to fight till death, as it's not a war, it's about creatures wanting to eat. Back when spears where new a lizard would retreat to its hole if you hit it with a spear, but later something happened that made them keep on going like zombies. Now I've patched up the old system, and once again they stop pursuing you when you damage them enough. So, even though it still takes 2-3 spears to
kill a lizard, one solid hit is enough to get rid of it. Then of course you might still want to kill it, because otherwise it will take a valuable spear with it into its hideout.
Update 186This is what a typical action sequence looks like with the current game rules:
It reads a bit better with sound. Basically what happens is that I spear them, and then I action around in attempts to retrieve my spears without them biting me. Because I only have 2 spears, and these enemies take a minimum of 3 hits to kill. When their heads flash white, that's when they're deflecting spears. It might be a little hard to understand what's going on without the sound indicating when I actually
do hit them in the flesh, but you get the idea.
Note how the blue lizard tries to pick up a spear, but I snatch it from its jaws. That's a very dangerous manouver
Other than recording this gif I spent today polishing some of the new stuff that has come with the "hard heads" change. For example, now that the game actually keeps track of spears going in the mouth of the lizards, I added a new separate "throat health". When lizards want to do mouth based stuff, such as spitting or throwing out their sticky tounges, they need to check against their throat health first. So if you manage to jam a spear down there, or even hit them with a few rocks in their mouths, they won't be able to do that stuff any more.
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