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[Gueib]

Everything looks awesome!
Is this Unity, by the way? There's something with the art in your .gifs that makes me think this.

[barneycumming]

cheers onebitpunch & Gaeb

yep, this is done in unity- you're probably picking up on the movement and rotation being at full 1920/1080 res while the sprites are much lower- with something like game maker or another true 2d engine you wouldn't get that effect- we plan to try snapping sprites to the pixel grid to lessen the effect and make it feel more authentic at some point

anyway I animated the storekeeper finally!



I was going for kind of bored, grouchy... secretly a little depressed... and itchy hehe

I still want to add a bit where he wipes his nose after he sneezes, but this will do for the moment- at least he's not giving me that creepy thousand-yard stare anymore!

beard doesn't read too well against his body- need to add a lighter tone shading thing on there to make it stand out...

[Gueib]

I understand. What I do generally is set the camera's orthographic size to:

h / (p /2)

h = screen height
p = pixels per unit (if my sprites are set to be 32 pixels per unit, I set this to 64)

And increase pixels per unit by a power of two based on screen height. The camera ends up showing more stuff on higher resolutions, tho.
If this is a problem, snapping everything seems the best option.

(Storekeeper looks faaabulous~)

[Reilly]

Haha, love that big galoot!

[eigenbom]

Great animation as usual :D

[Storsorgen]

I looked a the Bomb playthrough, game seems absolutley fantastic

I failed to understand though, is this only played on the same computer or is there internet support?

[karlozalb]

haha that storekeeper is pure love!

[One-bit Punch]

Now this is going into the realm of full-blown character animation. Wonderful stuff!!

[barneycumming]

thanks guys it was fun doing some straight personality acting stuff after all that combat- people have had some pretty cool ideas i want to incorporate when i do the next pass on him, such as storekeeper getting surprised awake when the hero walks in

i would really like to make him a secret monster, where you can possess him as a ghost if you have done some special/secret stuff :D

[barneycumming]

i'm working on some images for a little intro thingy that explains the gameplay a bit for new players...

here is my initial doodle for what it could look like



there would be 3 or 4 of these frames, slightly animated in that animatic style, just outlining the player's goal

[Christian]

Can you post a wordless version of that? I think I just found my new wallpaper

Oh, and I had asked this a while ago on the Greenlight page, but I don't recall if you had answered: how does single player work? Just a regular dungeon crawler with AI controlled enemies?

[barneycumming]

here you go: http://www.powerhoof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/animatic1920x1080.png

we have bots so you can play the regular game with only 1 human player, but it is a multiplayer focused game, so it's like playing street fighter against computer vs playing against people- it's never going to be as good...

i would really like to do a "classic roguelike" mode which you can play single player or cooperatively with multiple heroes- this would be more like what you describe, where you just play against AI monsters in a randomly generated dungeon... but that is a very different game with it's own set of design requirements, so i won't be able to think about that until the regular multiplayer mode is complete

[karlozalb]

here you go: http://www.powerhoof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/animatic1920x1080.png

we have bots so you can play the regular game with only 1 human player, but it is a multiplayer focused game, so it's like playing street fighter against computer vs playing against people- it's never going to be as good...

i would really like to do a "classic roguelike" mode which you can play single player or cooperatively with multiple heroes- this would be more like what you describe, where you just play against AI monsters in a randomly generated dungeon... but that is a very different game with it's own set of design requirements, so i won't be able to think about that until the regular multiplayer mode is complete

I want a t-shirt with that extreme violence image 

[AlphaPlus]

This seriously reminds me of Monkey Island.

Lots of character :D

[barneycumming]

a little more art:



this is support for a new mechanic we're toying with for fighting the boss...

currently the game doesn't end until someone defeats the boss, which I don't like for a few reasons

1- the game can really drag on if people keep failing to beat the boss.  The ramping up of monsters and equipment can't continue forever, so the intensity caps out after a point and the game loses it's feeling of progression- quick matches is what the whole thing is designed for

2- if a game can only end once the boss is killed, it means we can't really make the boss very hard or we risk the "dragging on" problem becoming a standard thing in most games- so currently the boss is not nearly as challenging as we would like, just to prevent that problem

3- it should be an achievement to defeat a boss- a big excitement where you don't know if you'll achieve it or not... it should be a special thrill to kill one!  If it is inevitable that someone will kill the boss each game, so much of the excitement and achievement is lost

so we're working on a system where the game can come to an end without anyone defeating the boss, and with the in-game narrative, we'd like to show that instead of killing the boss and escaping the dungeon, the boss kills you and escapes itself to be unleashed on the world...

so for the time being we'll have a shot like this for the end of the game if you fail on the boss- I'd like to cut it up into parallax layers, add a few simple animated elements and show it with just a little movement to give it more life

[Cakeypigdog]

That's a lovely idea. I miss contextual game over screens!

[RLofC]

I've been watching the latest CRAWL vids and I can't wait to get my hands on it
Keep up the amazing work! CRAWL is turning into a masterpiece.

Q: Did you guys use any 2D physics in the game? or is it just custom code? How did you make the hit detection and impacts work so goooood?

[barneycumming]

cheers Cakeypigdog

RLofC- we use the regular Unity 3d physics, just with the z depth disabled/ignored.  It is kind of hard to avoid using it for certain things...  it isn't perfectly right for our purposes however, so we do a lot of ignoring and overwriting velocities and manually moving things all over the place to prevent the physics from messing with the snappy 2d feel you get from hand-made non-physics 2d movement code...

some elements of the gameplay feeling does suffer slightly from using the physics- some circumstances aren't as clean as when i just script it really simply in a 2d engine, but it is more robust like this and handles lots of edge cases, and then we get things like pushing around monsters and scenery sort of for free

we started crawl before unity put in all the 2d stuff, so we don't really use it as we already developed a workflow and set everything up without it, but next time we do a game jam or prototype in Unity i'm keen to give it a try

[RLofC]

Looks like you've got it just right.. your work is truly inspiring.

[barneycumming]

thanks