next »

[oyog]

I can continue making the game I want to make.

Yes, do this.

I really like that dead enemies fall off the vases.  I imagine them starting to clutter the floor under the vase.  Little two dimensional characters staining the floors of ancient Greek villas...

[heck]

Apart from being on consoles that is a familiar sounding scenario. :/

Anyway, I can sit and be disappointed that some parts of my idea are no longer completly unique, or I can continue making the game I want to make.

So...

Here's a video of some new stuff I've been working on:

Yeah, keep the spirits up! You've been doing well so far. The game looks promising.
I really like the art style.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Like the new spear and block tweaks 

[Caran Elmoth]

Anyway, I can sit and be disappointed that some parts of my idea are no longer completly unique, or I can continue making the game I want to make.

Yes yes yes! That's exactly the point! Don't lose the grip on your vision!

[Ninja Dodo]

Thanks.

I really like that dead enemies fall off the vases.  I imagine them starting to clutter the floor under the vase.  Little two dimensional characters staining the floors of ancient Greek villas...

Yeah... I mean purely as a mechanic it's lifted straight from Mario, but it seems oddly appropriate.

I'm not sure I will do this for larger enemies because the player wouldn't have the force to knock them off the vase, but for the regular-size ones it works.

[Ninja Dodo]

So one thing you may notice in the video is sacrifices currently double as health. It makes sense fictionally to get another chance in exchange for a sacrifice and I like the simplicity of having only one thing to collect and keep track of... BUT I have some doubts as to the clarity and I think there is a risk of frustration. For example: if you are saving up sacrifices to ask for a god-power later and you lose those sacrifices because you get hit once or twice and are then unable to employ the strategy you had in mind... That would be bad.

If I separate health out into helmets or shields or something (probably shields) it would mean one more thing on the HUD, but the player won't have to worry that they're going to run out of sacrifices unless they actively use them, which is preferable. In this case it could be that if a player loses ALL health they get a respawn in exchange for one sacrifice.

Right now I'm leaning towards separating the two.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Yeah I'm with you and think it would work better for the player if they were separate. Can imagine it getting frustrating if you lost your god power because you were hit. Although in some ways can see it making sense the first way because one hit should kill you, but the gods can keep you alive.

[rek]

Why not do... both?

Your sacrifice/god power doubles as your extra life count, but the player can also pick up shields – actual physical shields – in the level that automatically protect for two hits before shattering and falling off the vase.

That way you only have to add a single shield icon to the HUD (with two states: full strength, half strength) instead of a second row of icons.

[Ninja Dodo]

And: Version 9



Download: http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/hellas/hellas_v09.zip

So, sound and damage...

I haven't got sound for everything yet - sword hits are notably absent - but it's a start. I tried to add variations for repeated sounds where possible. I didn't have any farm animals readily available so the sheep baah-ing is from Soundsnap. The rest is my own recording.

Besides enemies, the player is hurt by falling stones as shown in

and spears if you get hit with the pointy end. This means that you can hit your fellow player as well. I may adjust this so that spears thrown directly by players cannot harm you (except in versus), but once bounced off a platform or thrown by a god they can...

One change I didn't show in the video is a min and max duration on sword attacks. So if you tap X (or CTRL) the attack continues long enough to be visible and if you hold it the attack stays until you let go of the button, or until the end of the attack. Having that range where the timing is controlled by the player I think makes the controls feel more connected.

Why not do... both?

Could do, but I could see that being confusing: like if you lose your "shield" pickup why does it not affect the one you're holding and using to block? If you consider the last shield breaking as "dying" (player falls off the vase) you get around that.

[oyog]

I threw the block and it got stuck in the stairs causing the block collision sound to repeat endlessly.

Just got this message while playing:

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event
for object o_loopmid:

In script loopmid:
In script loopfollow:
Error in code at line 29:
   relpos = argument0.x-o_loopend.x;
                      ^
at position 21: Unknown variable x

[Ninja Dodo]

I'll have a look at it. Thanks for the bug report.

[rek]

Why not do... both?

Could do, but I could see that being confusing: like if you lose your "shield" pickup why does it not affect the one you're holding and using to block? If you consider the last shield breaking as "dying" (player falls off the vase) you get around that.

Right... I forgot he's actually holding a shield all the time. Well, I'm sure you'll figure something out.

[Ninja Dodo]

Will try.


Version 9.1

http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/hellas/hellas_v09_1.zip

[edit: site was hacked this weekend so I took down the link temporarily... appears to be fine now]

Did a quick fix to prevent the stone sound from infinitely repeating. I'll see if I can sort out the underlying collision problem later.

I haven't been able to reproduce the "loopmid" error, but I put in something to double-check that object "argument0" really definitely exists which should prevent it from breaking if it happens again.

[Ninja Dodo]

So I had some trouble this weekend with my site getting hacked. I've done a thorough clean up of the whole thing. I took down some of the download links in the thread as a precaution, but everything seems to be sorted now so I've put them back.

I've re-uploaded all files from offline backups just in case.


Meanwhile I've been doing some work on enemies for the next version:

[Caran Elmoth]

Wow, those skeletons look creepy! (which is good... for skeletons, you know)

[Franklin's Ghost]

Skeletons look great and work really well visually in the setting  

[rek]

I immediately thought of the Jason and the Argonauts skeletons, which I hope was intentional:

[Ninja Dodo]

Oh yes. Had to be done.

[Ninja Dodo]

Progress:

[eigenbom]

Love me a good skellington!