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[JobLeonard]

I'll see if I can redesign the jelly movement and get it a bit more exciting, or... jelly-like.

My friend made this game for last weekend's Ludum Dare:

http://glauron.frozenfractal.com/

The reason I'm sharing it is the way he made the dragon's body out of a very simple linked chain - see his post-mortem for details.

Maybe you can do something with long jelly tentacles that have a similar feature?

[Mothil]

Wah, that is indeed very cool! I'll definitely keep that in mind.
The only 'problem' I could see with this is that my sprites are rather small... I'm not sure how that would work considering the pixels.

It looks very interesting, though. Looks like he did a great job!

[JobLeonard]

Have a sprite for the body, use a bunch of line primitives for the tentacles?

[Mothil]

Naha... Single pixels! 

[Mothil]

So the thing is, this enemy is going to behave a lot different. Akiro can't exactly... flee from him. He is stuck at the same Y position relative to camera (until later) and follows Akiro on the X axis (left-right). When he gets close, and preferably with some timer so it looks a lot more smooth: he will pop into his shell and fly up and try to hit Akiro.

For a while there I was really wondering how I could make him stick to the camera, and then it hit me... Just place him under the camera as a child. Works wonders! ... for now.

[JobLeonard]

(source)

(not-so-subtle "still working on this?" bump)

[Mothil]

hahah, that's so cute!
Yes, I'm kind of still working on the game. I've already said this on my other dev-log, but I should have said it here as well. I'm currently moving, and trying to find myself a job. A job as a store cleric would be okay, but I think I could quickly long for a more creative job. Therefore I've spent about 90% of my spare time teaching myself web development, as I think this would be a very cool field to work in. I could spend less time teaching myself this, but I feel like if I can plug in all my spare time into this now, I can hopefully get a job in web development within short time.

And of course web development can be Akiro related! Just three days ago I tried making a landing page, whereas I got the animation of Akiro swimming in a circle on the browser. It was okay, but I'm leaning more towards creating a blog. (I really love writing, and I think it'd be a great mix of learning web-dev and semi-working on Akiro simultaenously.

Here's the rough sketch of the landing page/blog idea:



When it comes to the actual game, I've only written like 10 lines of code on the turtle-script.

[Samson]

I look forward to seeing how this project evolves. I've always been fond of pixelated ocean environments/creatures; reminds me of an old Game Maker game I played back in the day - Elu Undersea.

Good luck with your web development.

[Mothil]

Heya, Samson! Thank you for the kind words.
I just looked up Elu Undersea, what a cute visual style!

[Mothil]

Here's the "result" (not finished yet, but the basic blog functions works) from the sketch I posted right over here. In the sketch I was wondering if I wanted a twitter widget on the right side, and the social icons under, but... I'm thinking I'll make them stick to the top instead. Here's the current 'landing page':



I need to create a better looking header soon, that one's just a screenshot.

[Mothil]

http://mothil93.github.io/akirothesquid/

He-hey, up and running!
It's not much, but it's at least up and running.

[JobLeonard]

 

[Mothil]

Some algae-ish... thingies!
Today I'm taking a break from web development to spend some quality time with Akiro. I'm shuffling between fixing the turtle movement, sketching and planning some new enemies / redesigning.



This is my latest 'experiment'. When I first started creating this game, I had only static objects for the player to dodge. As I got further, and found out that moving enemies was very exciting - I skipped the static ones as a whole. I'm going back now and trying them again, cause I have this gut feeling that having a variation of moving and static enemies would be the best gameplay wise.

[Mothil]

Turtles now collide correctly, and they are a part of the pooling system. Next up is fixing their movement (as you can see on the screenshot, they all move to the left, while they should move towards player position x).

[Mothil]

All the turtles!
They actually feel very good now. Of course they're not nearly done, but considering I just changed their gravity when they approached, it does feel like they float and try to hit the player. Here's a gif!

[JobLeonard]

Looks cure, but it's a little bit weird they swim backwards

[Mothil]

Just fixed it! 

[Mothil]

Turtles spawn. Check.
Turtles face the right direction. Check.
Turtles float the correct direction (this one took me a handful of minutes, haha). Check.

Next up: Spawning them as children of main camera. The reason for this is because when Akiro moves, the turtles stay at the height they were spawned. I want the "Lakitu" feel, whereas the turtles always stay at that height, until they get close and then they float up.
After that: add them to the pooling system. It shouldn't take too long to fix this. I think I only have to add a range checker, as the code is already there.

[JobLeonard]

 

[Mothil]

The turtles stick to the camera now, which means that the basic functions are down. There are lots of stuff I have to fix (the aiming arc, the speed, animations and the small "bob" they do when they detach).