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[mirrorfish]

hey,

Just wanted to say that I love the mood and art here, really impressive! Keep it up and best of luck!

M/.

[rj]

i'm honestly serious when i say that there can not be enough good metroidvanias. this looks like one of the good ones; you've drawn up a world of something that feels a little metroid fusiony and is aesthetically similar to ghost in the shell, and i like that. i will be playing it.

[twotimingpete]

thanks guys

from SSS:

--

The dash skill is performed with the bumpers. Left always dashes left, right always dashes right, regardless of what way you're facing. The subtleties here are that you only dash max distance if you hold the button the entire time, you can let go at any point for the preferred dash length, and landing with pinpoint accuracy as seen here takes some skill.

The other bit of subtlety is that a backdash (not seen here -- but it's a different dash animation and it happens if you dash left while facing right or vise versa) has a bit less distance than the forward dash.


click for full size webm.

Being a "metroidvania", obstacles such as this are natural things you encounter while exploring. You may wonder what's on the other side, you may wonder enough to try and bumble your way through without even having the requisite ability (in this case, dash) which leads to that odd sense of not quite belonging...

[pikkukatti]

Looking pretty damn fine and I really like the idea of dash direction being controlled by the buttons, but I was wondering if it means that you keep facing the same direction as you were before dashing as in you can do backwards dashes? Otherwise I'd probably prefer it to be controlled by one button (as an option at least).

And apologies for not remembering and not having quite the time to delve in the past right now (I've kept up on you progress on GAF though), but have you or are you going to delve more into your level design process and how you're matching the gameplay, the atmosphere and balance in the level design?

[twotimingpete]

thank you -- to your question, dashing by itself does not change what way you're facing.

to illustrate how dash works, here's an example if you stand still and hit left bumper then hit right bumper.

http://gfycat.com/FrenchRevolvingIndiancow

as far as level design, I do have a process, but I guess I'm not sure what specifically you're asking of me -- did you have a more specific question?

[pikkukatti]

Yup gotcha, should be a really nice addition to the controls and add just a dash more complexity.

As for the level design, I was just more curious if you wanted to do a post on how you design levels, why you think the levels in Ghost Song are great and where you draw inspiration from etc. Just like get inside your head to see how you design our levels.

[DarkWanderer]

Dude those dash mechanics look perfect. Kind of reminds me of Harmony of Dissonance.
How many keys do you think GS will use at most? I would love to be able to play this with my SNES USB controller.

[twotimingpete]

Yup gotcha, should be a really nice addition to the controls and add just a dash more complexity.

As for the level design, I was just more curious if you wanted to do a post on how you design levels, why you think the levels in Ghost Song are great and where you draw inspiration from etc. Just like get inside your head to see how you design our levels.

thanks -- I'll see if there's anything I can do about that down the line.

Dude those dash mechanics look perfect. Kind of reminds me of Harmony of Dissonance.
How many keys do you think GS will use at most? I would love to be able to play this with my SNES USB controller.

thanks! I don't think it'd play particularly well on an SNES controller. It's designed for a 360 controller and generally uses more buttons than an SNES controller has, although you could technically do it (you'd have to live without a few things, like hold-to-aim LT and camera pushing with the right stick, it may also be hard to get weapon switching in)

[twotimingpete]

the background in this image: (click for larger size webm)




comes from this:



I had a bit of a eureka moment a while ago after putting in a color reduction shader (it's a shader that limits the number of colors on screen that a stencyl person wrote for me-- basically, depending on how you configure the value, it causes varying degrees of color banding from gradients).

it can be hard to capture the full effect of this in an animated gif due to degradation, but basically I take various rocks/chunks of rocks that I already use in the game and use the engine to scale them way, way up. The engine has anti aliasing it applies, which causes the sort of enlargement softness/blur you'd imagine, but after the color reduction shader this effect is not evident at all and the pattern is not easily recognizable as being a small graphic blown up.

Obviously there are some cases where the background needs to be far more detailed and thus needs to be made from bigger images, but when you're trying to populate a map with hundreds of rooms you find yourself relying on any shortcut you can come up with.

[Rat Casket]

if i dont play this game soon im going to hurt myself and others

[muki]

Congrats on being an RPS feature today!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09/15/ghost-song-metroid-castlevania-kickstarter/

Expect a flood of... well, everything I guess. 

[twotimingpete]

thanks guys --- the RPS writeup was a nice surprise, but there hasn't unfortunately been a flood just yet.  got a few new twitter followers and stuff like that.

[twotimingpete]

creepy mech

[Gamedragon]

Love the look of this! Just wondering is work still being done in Stencyl or have you changed engines?

[twotimingpete]

Love the look of this! Just wondering is work still being done in Stencyl or have you changed engines?

thanks it's still stencyl.

[twotimingpete]

These slugs travel on walls. They move slowly and have a slime shot attack from their tails. When killed, their husk can be stood upon as a platform.

In this particular room, you're normally expected to have the multijump to make your way up, but I've placed the slugs such that it's technically possible to get up without that ability. A bit tricky, yeah, but technically possible.



click for big/long

[rj]

this appeals to my super metroid instincts

[twotimingpete]

getting close.

http://gfycat.com/OfficialConcernedGrosbeak

[twotimingpete]

added my little flower menus.

http://gfycat.com/RemarkableAgreeableBubblefish

basically, there are a number of different types of flower ups (power up + flowers.. just coined the term) and each one can be consumed to increased one of your stats, depending on what it is, and some of them also carry imbue properties which imbue you with something until removed or overwritten by consuming another flower.

alternatively, once you have dizzy along with you, flowers can be fed to him instead of consumed for yourself..

[twotimingpete]

redid some old FX into something that I think is cooler:

http://www.gfycat.com/YearlyKlutzyGuineapig