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[nekromantikko]

Parcool is a fast-paced platformer designed specifically for speedrunning. It's basically my attempt to make a good Sonic the hedgehog game, which means it's nothing like Sonic the hedgehog (I like the concept but never liked any of the games). It's really more like classic Mario, but with some additional mechanics like walljumping and climbable ledges.

I've been working on this game slowly but surely on my limited free time for a bit over two years now. No game engine was used, I've written 90% of the code by myself from scratch with C++. Back when I started I had no programming skills or experience, so this project has been and continues to be a great learning experience.

Expect a playable demo sometime this... year? (I want to be extra careful with promises because of my horrible track record.)

[Dardangelos]

The mobility is looking really really good! I like how you speed up when you go down a slope, adds a nice effect. Reminiscent of Metroid.

[Christian]

Right up my alley, the fluidity and speed looks great. Following this

[Ito]

Looks really smooth You got perfectly what wall-jumping is about.

Nice sprites too, can't wait to see a more definitive approach.

Is there going to be any sort of combat?

[ghoulkid86]

Really feeling this. Played a lot of Sonic as a kid and I never liked being forced to come to a complete stop so often. Looks like you've got some solid mechanics going. Looking forward to further progress!

[nekromantikko]

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

To correct Dardangelos, the slopes don't actually change your running speed. I figured then I'd also have to slow the character down when running uphill, and that would just result in players jumping over all the slopes, which would be no fun.

@Ito I toyed with the idea of combat for a while, but decided it would probably slow the game down a lot. But if jumping on enemies counts, then yes :D

[nekromantikko]

A small update on what's going on at the moment: Last week I made custom file formats for the game's resources, which probably isn't all that interesting, and next I'm going to start working on a level editor. Although the game is still missing some gameplay elements, I want to get rid of hard-coded levels as soon as possible.



A great thing about working alone is I can come up with stuff as I go, so a lot of the details on certain things are still pretty blurry, such as the story, enemies, worlds etc. Above is a little mockup of what the first world might look like. Feedback on the visual style would be appreciated 

Also, as long as I'm showing you art, here's a better look at the (still unnamed) main character:

I'm not completely sure what her deal is yet.

[nekromantikko]

Slowly but surely making progress on the level editor:

Bigger version
The fact that things get corrupted like a real old school game is probably the thing I'm the proudest of about this to be honest. Anyway the level itself is a mess right now, but on the right there you can see the current version of the desert tileset, which I've improved a bit since the last update.

Right now I have some other things I need to do too so progress is kinda slow, but I'm trying to get a playable build out as soon as possible.

[Udderdude]

OMG Castlevania SOTN placeholder tiles :3

Looks cool so far.

[nekromantikko]

OMG Castlevania SOTN placeholder tiles :3

Looks cool so far.

Hey, somebody noticed!  :D
The collision detection was inspired by SOTN so I figured it'd be cool to use a similar debug tileset too. It's not exactly the same, as this game has a higher resolution, but it was definitely based on it.

[Runefrog]

I really admire the look of your main character. She looks like a genuine woman, and not a supermodel. I'm guessing you could get away with her looking sporty, but I think there aren't enough 'curvy' women represented in games. I hope you stick to that style.

[nekromantikko]

@Runefrog Thanks, I definitely will.

Since it's screenshot saturday or something, here's two new gifs:


Click for bigger versions!

[sam_suite]

Wow, that looks really solid. You can really get a great sense of momentum there.

[nekromantikko]

I'm not dead! I've just been a bit busy doing other things, and will continue to be for at least a week.

Anyway, in the meanwhile, have a gif of weird experimental silliness:


@sSuite Thanks! I'm quite proud of it myself!

[nekromantikko]

Hi. Oh wow, it's been ages since the last update!

I haven't posted in such a long time because, to be honest, there hasn't been all that much to show. Since I'm writing my own game engine from scratch, I haven't had the chance to work on the actual content of the game very much. Instead, I've been doing boring stuff like rendering, the entity system, and other under the hood things like that.

That said, after working on the project for a year now, I've finally finished most of the engine work and can start working on the content, art, levels, game objects... So this thread is going to get a bit more active again very soon!

Here's a tiny preview on what I've been doing:

Yes, those are actual 3d-models cleverly disguised as sprites.

PS. I started a blog for game development shenanigans at http://jpr-dev.tumblr.com/

[Ito]

Very good work, I'm loving everything new you're showing for this project.

I followed you on Tumblr.

Keep up the nice work, man.

[nekromantikko]

Still not dead yet!

So um, about that last update... It would probably be a huge understatement to say that I greatly underestimated the amount of engine work I still had left to do, as well as overestimated the amount of free time that I would have  Most of 2015 was spent doing things unrelated to this project, dumb things such as school and work. I'm starting to get back on track though, and will attempt to update this thread more (and spend more time on the forums overall) in the future (although given my past track record, I'm hesitant to make any promises).

Anyways, I also stupidly removed my photobucket account which broke most of the screenshots in this thread 
I won't reupload them since they were outdated anyways, but I updated and dumped some new gifs in the first thread!

[kraed]

She's kinda thick...niiice,a thick girl that does parkour, probably my dream in real life.
Kinda sad i can't see the missing images! I'm digging the tiles. Try adding some highlights, maybe lil detail and stuff, would love to see those tiles pop more.

Pretty please take the concept of "flow" into account, a parkour term. Hard to explain but (in my opinion) is a mixture of state, grace and fluidity between a series of movements. It would feel rad to be rewarded, for the player to move better and slicker, by trying to move more consecutively and precise.

[nekromantikko]

Pretty please take the concept of "flow" into account, a parkour term. Hard to explain but (in my opinion) is a mixture of state, grace and fluidity between a series of movements. It would feel rad to be rewarded, for the player to move better and slicker, by trying to move more consecutively and precise.

Yeah, that's the idea. I want every level to be beatable without ever having to stop. Walljumps are also more powerful if you have momentum. While you can still walljump without any previous momentum, you don't get as much height, distance or speed out of them. I'm still debating whether momentum should carry over when climbing a ledge, and how.



I downloaded the newest version of Tiled and noticed that it supports tile animation, so today I modified my tile system to support it as well. It also affects collision as you can see. (I gave up on writing my own level editor since tiled is so convenient, and also writing the actual game takes enough work as it is)

[lobstersteve]

I will always have a place in my heart for speedrunning platformers, so gonna follow this