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[ProgramGamer]

May be related to the issue I pointed out of the hitboxes not appearing?

[siskavard]

none of the hits seem to connect? what do you mean?

sorry, hyperbole.

some of them hit but it I was slashing at player 2 and nothing would happen about 80% of the time, & no he wasn't shielding.

Maybe I just suck at it

[Rat Casket]

none of the hits seem to connect? what do you mean?

sorry, hyperbole.

some of them hit but it I was slashing at player 2 and nothing would happen about 80% of the time, & no he wasn't shielding.

Maybe I just suck at it

i think player 2s hitboxes were broken a lot of the time. or she would get stuck invincibility.

[miascugh]

Hey people, I realized I should probably be posting here too. I'll try to feed you visual goodies and accept critical thoughts in turn every now and then. However, I am notoriously terrible at staying active on forums. Bye people.

[miascugh]

So, whenever I get stuck on a todo, I look for the item on the list that's the most different to that one. Which today meant doodle some effects:



This is hodgepodge, but I'm hoping to come up with an aesthetic with some recognition value for the effects, eventually.

[ProgramGamer]

I love the spinny stars! Please use that one as inspiration for the others. And doodles are always fun, at least IMO.

[Mya]

Lovely fx work

Loving the art in general actually - looking forward to having a play on this.

[Rat Casket]

dramatically nerfed the forward dash, and added a back dash. like in most fighting games, the back dash has invincibility frames, as you can see by the hurt box turning blue.

i also added variable jump height but its not in the gif. its there though, i promise.

[Crabby]

So much good art! It's pure eye candy! 
Amazing stuff.

[Rat Casket]

martin made a bunch of shellmet redesigns today.






we settled on the one in the bottom left of the last image, with the brown crest and green gloves.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

I love this easter egg.

Shellmet gonna be my main character once this game is released.

Good luck on this awesome project.

[miascugh]

thanks a lot bakkusa

@last image: Btw, we are aware of the palette issues of both character and the background clashing a lot in this one. That's not been tended to yet.

[siskavard]

OMG THE STEAM APES

[ProgramGamer]

The version with the bandage has slightly derpy eyes! I love the detail on this!

[Rat Casket]

i will be putting out a new build this weekend. i would like to continue to put out weekly, or bi-weekly, builds to test various mechanics.

the next build will feature some new things and some things will be removed. forward dash distance has been nerfed, and the ability to cancel the dash into an attack has been added. i really like being able to cancel the dash into an attack. your range is more or less extended by doing this, and since a forward dash is pretty risky in the first place, it sort of covers you as you advance.

back dash has been added and has invincibility frames. before now the back dash was just way too safe. you could whiff an attack and back dash out to avoid any sort of counter attack. i may need to shorten the back dash distance even further but we will see.

shield has been removed for now. i just cant figure out how to balance the thing. originally, the shield would stun whoever hit it. which is still a good mechanic but presents a real problem for projectile based characters. it would feel like shit to be stunned because somebody blocked an attack that wasn't attached to you, or that you had since moved away from. potential fixes for this issue would be to block a projectile within x number of frames of it being created, or, before the attacking player has recovered and returned to their normal state. it still feels a bit off this way, however.

for now, i think, i will just leave the shield out of the build or add it as a power up that blocks any attack but does not stun the attacker. having it push the two players apart is fine for now but it is functionally the same as the clash. having two mechanics that push players apart is dumb. there has to be some middle ground here and i will find it.

this week i rebuilt the attack/dash states for the game. previously i had each state in a switch case, with a bunch of if statements for each attack within the attack state. i found out that you can nest switch cases so i decided to do that instead. now each attack is its own switch case, and it makes everything much easier to read and add to. i don't know how practical this is or if its even good programming but its much better than it was before. its not nearly as buggy as it was, if nothing else.

i plan to add clashing before the weekend rolls around. hopefully this will eliminate the 1 frame advantage that player 1 has. otherwise i really don't know how to solve that problem. a friend recommended a book that apparently houses the solution, so i will be reading through that. maybe. its a little over my head at times.

[ProgramGamer]

Why can't the shield just deflect bullets back at the source?

[Rat Casket]

because it makes projectile characters incredibly safe. you cant have melee guys getting stunned and potentially killed while projectile guys get to run around and do whatever. its horrifically unbalanced.

[marcgfx]

deflecting bullets, might not be such a bad idea? balancing is always a tough job, even more so when the protagonists have a very different spectrum of attacks. if projectile guys had different disadvantages, I'm sure it would work too. I'm sure you will find a good solution, with or without shield.

about switch statement and good programming: as long as it gets the job done and lets you work fast, I don't see why not. If you have multiple switch cases in-line that might get a little ugly though. maybe call a function with the second switch-statement?

[Rat Casket]

the current nature of the shield DOES NOT work with projectiles. period. theres no getting around it.

[ProgramGamer]

But you don't need to balance it, because by nature it's way easier to dodge or shield a projectile than a melee attack, since you see it coming from so far away. So yeah, projectile characters are safer but also way less effective, so I don't see how it's a problem for Kerfuffle. 

If you still think it's a problem, you could also just make it so that you actually spawn a shield that stays in place at the players's location. If it is destroyed by a melee attack, the attacker gets stunned, projectiles destroy it in one hit but it gives a window of escape for the character using the shield, while making it less effective against melee guys. Would/could this work?