Hello all, I'm back from my break! Prepare for a massive reply session, sorry some of these are very late replies:
You can mask the cloud jitter if they jitter at a constant rate. You can achieve this by giving them a 3 frame animation. Nothing fancy, just redraw the clouds a few times, but be a bit inconsistent to create a noise in the shapes. Think of Yoshi's island.
So to make the jitter less noticable, make them jitter more
Yeah that could work, it might give them a bit more life too. I would have to be careful not to create too much extra work for myself in terms of adding animations to all the other backgrounds in the game, as it's important that they feel consistent! For now I've been able to reduce the jitter by speeding the clouds up a little and making sure their subpixel movement is matched up better.
I'm developing it in C++ on PC, using SDL 2.0 and OpenGL 2.1.
Why are you using SDL 2
and OpenGL 2.1 ??
SDL 2 provides hardware-accelerated (2D-)rendering and OpenGL is just old as the hills and deprecated.
For me it feels like you'd buy a sports-car and build in an old 3-cylinder engine.
I'm using the tools I'm using because I have existing code to work from, I have experience using them, so they're a safe bet. I like how SDL handles input and some other stuff, but I've never used the graphics side of it so I don't want to learn that now. Please don't place too much importance on the technology game devs choose to use, it's a pretty personal thing to them and it doesn't affect the players in most cases.
I was curious about a few things.
In earlier posts you talked about the Fire and Water powerups, and how they would work, especially in how they would be opposites in terms of defense and offense, etc. Seeing that the Bubble would be used for defensive and traversal purposes, it reminded me of some Castlevania games I've played. In one of them, attacking enemies with an ice-based element will freeze them into blocks of ice, which you can jump on to get to higher, secret areas. This made me think that, you could also use the Bubble ability on the enemies, to make them float, so you could jump onto them and bounce to higher places, or simply use the ice-block feature I mentioned.
I have considered this kind of putting-enemies-in-bubbles ability, it's interesting. The enemy interactions can be fairly complex already so I'm not sure if it's necessary to add this.
As for the fire ability, you talked about it being able to take down higher level enemies you wouldn't be able to under normal circumstances. I thought it might be interesting if, between your starting and ending points of the roll, fire is left burning on the ground, which would take a while to disappear, and enemies that were on it, or moved to it, would be damaged over time.
That feels more like a Kirby-ish attack - in the Kirby games the enemies have a proper health system so you can do things like attacks that damage them over time. In Leilani I'm going more for a Mario-style feeling where the enemy is either alive or dead. You should be able to tell the state of the enemy by looking at it so there's no hidden health bars etc.
Also, in one of the earliest updates you had made, you said you didn't know exactly what would change between the size of enemies, from small to large. I thought it would be interesting if certain enemies that were too big for you, or perhaps covered in spikes, could only be damaged by smaller enemies you rolled into so they rolled into them. This could really come into play during boss sequences, if there are bosses. One boss might be so large it's immune to Leilani, but not from spiked minions that it continually summons forth, which need to roll into it.
This is really nice
using smaller enemies / objects as weapons to attack larger enemies will definitely be something I do!
Lastly, I wanted to say I really like how you are handling the machines at the end of the level. You said that by destroying them completely, you might get a certain bonus, but you didn't know what that would be. I'm not sure if you know this, but in Super Mario World 3D, if you get to the top of the flag, it turns yellow. After that, it will show as being yellow on the world map. Getting all of them like that is necessary to get to a bonus challenge level at the end of the game. I thought it would be interesting if, in Leilani's Island, destroying all the machines in a zone completely would disable a barrier to a secret level in that zone, or something similar.
Yep something like this could be good, not sure on the exact details! I did enjoy getting the golden flags in 3D World / 3D Land. In some ways I'm not so keen on the idea of making the player replay a level just to get the golden flag, but that does help to add a lot of tension when you're jumping towards the goal pole - you really want to hit the top of the pole so you don't have to come back to the level later!
I was wondering what you thought of these suggestions, or if you already were thinking of similar things to implement into the game. Either way, I'm looking forward to playing.
Thanks for the suggestions, much appreciated
Nice idea to move the drops to limit the amount of time player has to collect them. I noted something similar in Rayman Origins with bubbles holding items that are taken up to the skies ... that is more demanding to the player as coming a bit late requires increased platforming skills to grab it. Yours is more player-friendly, as far as I can tell.
Yeah that's a very good point, the falling drops get easier to grab as they drop down, but if they floated upwards they would require more skill to get. Worth thinking about...
Hey!
Found out from a developer meetup in Cambridge that you're local! (Can't remember who, I think Tom Kail mentioned it?) The game is absolutely gorgeous. Me and my partner have started running game jams in the local area, it'd be awesome for you to come along!
Hiya! Always good to hear from other local devs
I go to
CB2 Indies every week, if that's of interest to you. Now following you on twitter!
This is really slick-looking. I really like how you've put your own spin on the Mario platformer formula with your own clever mechanics.
I've sort of skimmed the devlog and noticed a couple conversations about how to utilize shells now that your game doesn't have a life system. I have a couple suggestions to make that I don't recall seeing made.
One thing you could do is have an end-of-level mini-game a la Super Mario Land 2. In that game, if you could ring the end goal bell, you would get to play a mini-game where you could acquire one of the game's powerups. Instead of an end-game bell in your game, you could make there be a target shell count you need by the end to play it. These games also worked with a limited prize pool, so similar style mini-games could fit into the current scope of what you have. This does mean, however, you might have to work a little harder to balance the shell count in each level.
If you wanted even more flexibility with shells, you could also implement something similar to Super Mario World. Instead of playing a mini-game at the end of a level, Super Mario World tallied bonus points (that were acquired by hitting the end-level tape.) Once you pass a bonus point/shell threshold, the player is whisked to the special end-level mini-game to earn some spoils.
At any rate, hope you figure it out! Keep this up, because it looks fantastic.
Thanks for the suggestions! All solid ideas.
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