You could potentially use an extension that can track the current position in the song, and then you wouldn't have to worry too much about framerate. Supersound is one example, but it's ancient and I don't know if Studio plays well with it. I'm sure there's something more recent out there if you did some digging.

I thought Super Paper Mario was pretty good, it's just confusingly named since it is in no way like its predecessors. Sticker Star, on the other hand, was more like the originals but had some glaring design flaws...

Pokemon Master Trainer? That game is great. Though I recommend removing the Trade cards for your own sanity

Splendor is also good. However, I've found that new players tend to think there's like, no strategy, and attribute a loss to random chance, which is a bit unfortunate. I'll admit that there is a bit of stepping on toes going on that turns it into a game of politics.

Another fave: Star Wars Epic Duels. I'm not a huge fan of Star Wars but I can still appreciate how well the characters match their decks thematically. I recommend playing with the online community's rule changes (mainly you can place your units on any of your spawn points and your minors don't die when your majors do). The online community also has many more decks out there, which we used to great effect. They seem to be surprisingly well-balanced save a few.

You can just press Escape, sorry if that wasn't obvious!

And yeah, the one resource thing was fun, especially if you figure out how it works. It's a bit... different

I made a game with exactly one resource: a room.

Executable
Source file (GM8.1)

Give it a try, and then if you want to, you can try to figure out how it works

The game itself is very simple. There are 8 levels, and you'll probably know how it plays from this image:



Also, the game flickers a bit, due to how it works. You've been warned!

The new rules seem good in general, but I think they need some tweaking. Starting at 20 length is okay, but only getting +1 length for the first upgrade is probably not. The difference from 20 to 21 is too minimal, and you don't really get to start surrounding anything other than squares until about 25. It makes it feel like it takes too long to really get going in the game. Consider having the upgrades be something like +3/+2/+2/+1/+1/+1/... so that the doldrums don't last as long. Also, you have to work harder for those first upgrades since you can't surround large numbers, so it should feel more natural.

And when it comes to accidentally eating yourself, maybe you should get all of your lost length back when you get your next 10 (but no upgrade), since it's kind of easy to get 'in the hole' and never make it back out. I think it may be a bit too punishing, especially considering it already resets your counter to 0.

Also, I had an idea for how you could surround corner-life. Maybe if you just formed a box with a wall, the life inside could be eaten? like so:

.XXXXX.
.X...X.
.X...X.
XX...X.
~~~~~~~

Well, problems might arise there (like where does the snake's head go?) but it would certainly be useful.

Another possible solution to that: have one space on the perimeter where cells/cherries can't spawn, so that you can always surround things. It might be a bit abusable though, hard to say. It would fix the R-pentominos always flying into corners and making un-removable boxes too

It was pretty fun, though I felt compelled to play it like regular snake, and hardly surrounded things. I guess I would have if I knew it gave score, though. Maybe it takes a bit too much length to surround things, as in you can't do it as often as you'd like without going cherry hunting for a long while. Perhaps the first cherry after a surround could give you some portion of the lost length back to make it more of a back-and-forth.

EDIT: Ah, I wasn't aware that you actually don't seem to lose much if any length for surrounding things. Then maybe it's fine as it is.

Also, I ran into this scenario:



The pattern wouldn't ever destroy the cherry and I couldn't surround it. I could have waited for something else to spawn there, but that might have taken a while.

I think it would more likely be limited consumable items (bonfire swords), kinda like soul vessels.

For the input issue - take a look at keyboard_check_direct. It fixes that, but it has the minor drawback of still accepting inputs when the application is out of focus.

I wish I knew more about how items work, but I never use 'em so I don't have much insight. If there's nothing that can heal you yet, maybe 'Portable Scarecrow' might be a cool one

Looking really great! All of these changes seem to be steps in the right direction.

I know GM 8.0 has native controller support, see the section titled "The joystick" in the documentation. However for my current project (which is also in 8.0) I used xinput because the default was flawed in some way or another (I don't remember the problem anymore though). I'm sure there are more recent dlls out there too, but xinput worked like a charm for me.

Edit: Ah yes, xinput was xbox-style controllers only though. I feel like they're quite ubiquitous anyway, but it is a shortcoming.

Thanks for getting back to me, Rakugaki.

I was playing a new game all the way through.

As for weapon balance, I'd try beating a boss with gas+boomerang and shield+boomerang and make sure it can be done faster (but in a riskier manner due to range) with the latter. If not, then there's probably some tweaking to do. I just tried it on Samuel and I can get 1/4 of his health bar in one go with gas+boomerang (the normal shot, thrown so that it's kinda turning around at his head), and maybe only half that with all my effort on shield+boomerang.

I agree that gun+boomerang does have some use now, but its power feels a bit on the weak side for being a combo ability, and I find myself always preferring one of two very useful abilities that went into it instead.

Anyway, it's probably nitpicky, but sometimes the difficulty can make such things problematic. That makes it all the better when it's all balanced, though!

I just beat the demo and have some more feedback!


*I played the whole thing on a gamepad with Joy2Key. It worked really well! Are you ever planning to innately support it, though? (my mapping was A-jump, X-attack, B-dodge, LB&RB-drop souls, if anyone's interested)

*In several of the later levels (pretty much every new one for this demo), checkpoints flat out didn't work for me, making them much harder to beat. I don't know if that's because my save got messed up, or if they're not implemented yet.

*A few notes on Kotobi: The tongue in general behaves weirdly, sometimes bouncing off the floor when trying to get to you, and retracting strangely as well. Its hitbox is also quite erratic. At times, it seems like you can hit the entire tongue sprite to inflict damage, and other times my attacks will whiff at the ball. I wonder, is the ball of the tongue even a hitbox? As for other attacks, I think the eye-missiles might fall just a tad too fast, and when the seed bombers start showing up, there seem to be a bit too many.

*Partially regarding the above, some bosses just have a pool of HP that can't even be scratched without all but the strongest of powerups. This calls for better overall weapon balance to allow for more than just a handful of combos being useful (see below).

*Some of the camera cuts for events, like when you beat Nadia, are quite jarring since they happen instantly. I'd recommend a slide transition if you can manage it.

*I figured out what to do with the green eye spirals. I was wondering for so long!

*Especially around enemies that seem like pinatas bursting to the seams with cubes, crystals, spheres, stars, and money, it's easy to get lost in the confusion of an enemy's death and the very real attacks coming at you. I don't know how to fix this and I like the flashy deaths, just bringing it up.

*When Jack jumps into the honey-coated elevators in the beehive, I assume his object is being destroyed, and re-created when he jumps out. This works fine, except for the pesky issue of depth. Jack and his hat seem to be at the same depth, so since Jack existed first he is drawn below his hat, and when he is re-created he will be drawn above his hat. I would recommend just making the hat's depth just be Jack's minus 1 so that this can't happen.

*Weapon balance:
-Gas+Boomerang is still incredibly powerful. Most combination powerups sacrifice something, be it speed, power, or range. Gas+Boomerang has it all, though. You can use it to burst down minibosses basically before they can act. I would assume that power level isn't intentional, so I'd suggest a damage reduction.
-Gun+Boomerang is, sadly, still quite ineffective. Despite being made from two of the most versatile and long-ranged powerups, it touts no range of its own, and its power is underwhelming to say the least. I'd recommend heavily boosting its damage and possibly making the shot speed faster.
-It seems like most of the Gas combos that actually use generic gas-attacks are underwhelming. They don't do enough damage to really seem worth using.
-I didn't play around much with Drill, but its range seems too short (I know that's the point), such that some enemies simply can't be safely hit with it without resulting in a trade.
-Shield+Boomerang, while looking awesome, doesn't seem to be balanced for the short range it confers. Its damage output is meager and can't compare to safer, stronger things.


Anyway, concerns aside, the game is great as ever! The background scenery is very nice and the levels were all varied and fun. Keep up the great work, I can't wait until the full thing's out!

The "pros" usually don't use slower, more powerful weapons (2-handed) except for in tight areas. In a large space where players can evade freely it's usually advantageous to have a quicker moveset (like 1-handed) because the game becomes about catching people out of a roll, after attacking, or on low stamina. The extra damage from two-handing just isn't worth it then, since you can throw out less moves, use more stamina, and are more avoidable/punishable due to longer animations. Don't forget parrying: many slower windups are easily parried on reaction with good timing. There's also the whole lack of being able to use anything in your other slot while two-handing.

There are, of course exceptions, depending on moveset. The Claymore/Zwei's 2h moveset has a lot of range and good speed and can be easily dead-angled to cross-up shields, so you see a lot of people using that.

Quite fun and polished. I wouldn't call it a Metroidvania though, it's quite obviously entirely linear. Boss Rush might fit better. Anyway, the music was great, the graphics were charming, the pacing was good... the only minor gripe I can think of is that bosses sometimes make you wait a really long time before you can hit them.
Great work!

A hellish-sounding theme.

https://soundcloud.com/blockdude11/infernal-heartbeat

Strings are 1-indexed, and passing 0 to some string functions like string_delete makes them fail. So do this instead:

Code:

tempWord = string_copy(tempText,1,string_pos(" ",tempText));
tempText = string_delete(tempText,1,string_pos(" ",tempText));

Objects of the enum's 'type' can only hold the values stated. They're good for when you only want a small range of possible values, like a closed set. For example:

enum Sense {
SIGHT,
TOUCH,
HEARING,
TASTE,
SMELL;
}

You don't want any other identifier for something that's a Sense, so you use an enum for it.

Practically speaking, enums are good to use for restricting inputs. Like with a switch-case statement where you don't want just anything hitting default, if you pass an enum's value into it you don't have to worry.

But here's more:

http://crunchify.com/why-and-for-what-should-i-use-enum-java-enum-examples/

Yeah, hence the 'sometimes'. For the most part there isn't much execution barrier, but some tech requires a good amount of skill to pull off, and consistently.

Yeah, Smash looks easy at face value. Pretty much anyone younger than a certain age is going to have played Smash before. A good chunk will think they are a god at the game and their secret weapon (likely Kirby's Down-B) is enough to beat anybody. I should note that actually getting good at an entry in the series competitively is a different story. The FGC may write it off because it doubles as a hectic party fighter and it's so different, but there's a lot of mental conditioning that goes into playing at a high level and a good deal of tech to master in any of the games (Smash 4: All the 'intended' stuff + perfect pivots, jab locks, B-reversing / wavebouncing).

The problem with tech in competitive Smash is that a lot of the tech that exists wasn't intentional, though, and it leads to some annoyingly frame-perfect stuff. It actually creates an interesting situation where games like Melee can sometimes be more demanding on the user than even a normal fighting game. I mean just look at multishining. The only limit to how much you can do it is your hand cramping up

Anyway I only really play Smash competitively. I've won a few local tournaments so I like to think I know what I'm talking about