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[Connor]

While I was implementing the Shield Wall skill for bast, I was thinking that the Magnetic Ring was not actually fitting her design. If there were no projectiles the skill would be completely useless, so I've decided to remove it for now.

I didn't want to loose the damage absorbsion part of the Magnetic Ring, so I thought about a new ultimate ability: Bast absorbs all damage her allies take, after the effect is over she returns a percentage of the total damage she received to the enemies that inflicted damage, or something along those lines, still a WIP.

I made it so that the Shield Wall is able to push some enemies. Bast will be moving while using the shield (but of course, slower than usual) and it would be weird if enemies just clipped through this supossedly unpenetrable shield or wall of magic or however you want to see it (I don't even know myself lol..)

the one where shes falling towards the camera is really, REALLY cool. if you could add that in as a death type thing, dang. it would be pretty awesome.

[Canotico]

the one where shes falling towards the camera is really, REALLY cool. if you could add that in as a death type thing, dang. it would be pretty awesome.

Well, it was indeed a bug but I do agree, it looked cool because it moved the character in a 3rd dimension.
It would definetly be nice to have that kind of effect in game, specially since I'm gonna have a character that travels between dimensions. However, adding it as a type of death wouldn't work for the players, since I want the players the be able to revive their dead teammates, and they won't be able to do so if they can't reach their bodies. But I'll keep it in mind and see what I can do about it

[Canotico]

Alright! so, been working fixing a lot of bugs and making the movement as good as possible for now. Also, I've finally started working on a couple of new enemies, the first one I call Burning Skull, its inspired in the ones from zelda.

Here is the actual draft I made, of course I didn't dedicate enough time to its looks, I just needed to know if it worked and well, it is indeed an annoying guy like I intended him to be :D

[Canotico]

Well, while the super-most-important stuff gets done (like, enemies and, the game?), I wanted to have some fun and added Bloom because. I actually want to also add ambient occlusion, but I think it won't be as straight forward as slapping the script in the camera like this one was, so it will have to wait for now.



Looks cool, I like glowy things.

[Canotico]

So I made a smarter camera which I am very happy with I will admit :D



It no longer just follows you around but also takes into account any kind of "interesting thing" I tell it to track and makes sure they are all in-screen.

[Shackhal]

Nice. Now there won't be fights for the camera xD

[Canotico]

Nice. Now there won't be fights for the camera xD

Indeed! It was already too annoying to playtest the game and having the camera centered on just one player. So there won't be any friendships at risk because of that now :D

During one of the playtests with the Polymath guys one of them was outside of the camera and stuck in a pit, and so he took the challenge of getting out of there by walljumping without even looking at his character. It was funny, he did get out, but besides that nice story, no one should be able to comdemn their teammate to be outside of the camera and be forever playing in his mind.

[Canotico]

Well, after a long cycle of bug fixing and tweaking, I finally got a working demo that I sent to Indiecade :D yaaay!

You can check the video of the gameplay right

!

Now that this demo is done I can finally go back to work on adding the missing 80% of the game!

[Canotico]

while I work on the world building, which is proving to be insanely fun btw, I'm working on a new sprite atlas for my test levels since... well, It's no secret that I HATE the placeholder tiles I made and that I've been using since forever.

So, I'm doing my best to step out of my comfort zone and make an atlas that is at least decent according to my standards.

This is the second day I've been working on it (I accidentally deleted the first one, yay me). It is nowhere near something interesting, but I think it's a good place to start. Notice those redish blocks? Oh yeah, it might not look like it but that's stepping way out of my comfort zone for these kinds of things. Why? Well it seems like I'm only comfortable using blue?... or at least cold colors.

Any way, I'll be posting a daily progress on this and by the end of this cycle I should have the sprite atlas of one of the levels of the castle. Oh yeah, I haven't talked about that, mainly because I'm still figuring out the zones the castle's gonna have. This one will be called the Magic School and it's supossed to be a place where you know... people learn magic and so I'm expecting it to be a very colorful place. I have absolutely no idea how am I going to get there but I'll figure something as I go.

Here, have this super-generic small tileset of bricks and more bricks, and a window apparently.

[Canotico]

So I tried to do a better version of what I had for the tileset, and after meeting with the Polymath guys I realized that I should be dedicating more time to answering questions related to how this Magic School actually looks like. I spent some time working on this but I see it more as an excersice rather than a final version of the tileset.



Right now I'm gonna be focusing on figuring out what does the Magic School actually looks like before I tackle the tileset again because well, if I don't know how it looks like and why it's gonna be a lot harder :D

[Canotico]

Well, since I finished world building and now have a very good idea of how everything in the game fits together, I can now do a better job making the castle areas and stuff.

I'm starting with what I call the Fire Magic Faculty, you can look at it as the equivalent of the fire temple in a zelda game.



This is just a "level" I put together for the sole purpose of seeing if it fits and how the characters look in it. It's just a test.

Of course this is not a finished version, but it's somewhere to start. As I make the enemies for this area I will iterate over the atlas to add new stuff and improve the existing ones.

[Canotico]

New enemy! And it's not a Slime yay! :D

I call it Hunter (although I'd like to give it a better name, I think it's too simple). It moves really fast and its job is to beat the crap out of the player with lowest HP.

The idea behind the Hunter is that the player that it is chasing should just try to keep running while the other players kill the Hunter, since it will always just try to kill the player with lowest HP.



This was just a test to see how it fit in the game. Like if it stood out enough from the background and how did it look compared to a player. Because of that I haven't made the animations yet but soon I will!

[Canotico]

The Hunter is training really hard to beat the players! It just can't wait to punch them till they stop moving.

[Canotico]

Well, while trying to implement the Crusher (which is a more fitting name than Hunter) in the game I came to the realization that the way characters, animations and skills interact with eachother is really crappy. This means that, as a programmer, I must then perform the sacred ritual of refactorization and rewriting a lot of code that is working perfectly fine for the sake of a tidier code.

Will it take me 1 day? 2? I don't know. I hope I don't end up breaking the whole game and that I can finish this quickly so I can have a quicker pipeline for new enemies.

While that piece of boring code gets done, entertain yourself with this neverending chase. The Crusher sure is persistent.

[Canotico]

Well good news, the refactorization was a complete success and now the Skills system is much clearer and optimized! YAY!

Also, I'm 70% done with this guy, check it out

[Pixel Noise]

Wow this is loads better since the last time I checked in - great progress!

The things you are doing with the smart camera, etc, are much appreciated, and will definitely give you a much better game overall, and better user experience.

[Canotico]

Wow this is loads better since the last time I checked in - great progress!

The things you are doing with the smart camera, etc, are much appreciated, and will definitely give you a much better game overall, and better user experience.

Thanks!

And yes the camera is super important for this kind of game so I want it to not get in the way of the experience. Glad it makes sense to add those things

[Canotico]

This guy is all about violence.



I just finished implementing it and it's already hard to deal with by myself so I'll call that a success :D

I'll be fixing a new bug related to skills being cancelled. I still don't know what's going on, but it seems like because of the attack speed of the Crusher, he usually cancels the ThunderSwordsman's attacks and this is causing the player to not be able to use skills until he is hit again. This is because when you use a skill, there is a safety method that forbids the player to use other skills until the first one finishes, and because it was cancelled and didn't finish, I'm guessing something went wrong and the safety method still thinks the skill is ongoing.

Any way I'll be fixing that and also start working on a new enemy :D

[migrafael]

Following! This is looking good! Love the animation on the new running enemy. Has the whole dragonball arms back thing going

[Katsusiro_7]

Really cool concept and implementation, wanna play the final version of the game.
Also, I think, the world needs more coop action games!