Try challening someone to port this to pico-8 or TIC-80! Maybe it'll get someone to pick up the torch and finish the game for you 

Ha, I think the original version of the game would be a little easier to port...



...Also, why is that youtube video not embedding?

Alright, here's the gameplay video I mentioned. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D_EPH5WN18

[Bear Hero Demo v0.4 [Win]]

Alright, it took me a while to get everything to a satisfactory state. I had a short list of features that I wanted to quickly get in before I considered it demo-worthy. Sadly, those are likely the last features that will be implemented for quite some time.

Download:
Bear Hero Demo v0.4 [Win]

And here's some stuff to look at!

Also, I'll probably upload a video in a couple days showcasing some other things.

And here's a big ol' changelog. The general thrust of development has been toward adding more action and impact to the gameplay. A lot of the tedium and waiting inherent in the old system has been gutted. Also, plenty of new stuff has been added such as Arena mode, a tutorial, five classes, five gods, and too many new enemies, spells, and relics to count.

System Changes
+Title screen and main menu added.
+New mode: Arena! Fight waves of monsters in pre-determined maps. Recommended for experts.
   +Two arena missions added: Burnt Offering, Tainted Emissary.
+New mode: Tutorial. Walks new players through the basics. Won't teach you everything, but should give some guidance.
+New mode: Practice. Take half damage from all sources. Enemies drop apples occasionally. No other changes. Recommended if things feel impossible.
+New classes added: Antipaladin, Archer, Mutant, Reaver, Veteran.
+Class select catalog implemented. After playing a class once, it will be permanently unlocked in the catalog, allowing you to choose it from a list by pressing Up in the class select menu. You can even see a special description of each class. Try to unlock all the classes for a full catalog!
+Morgue files added. Upon death or victory, a detailed text file record of the game is recorded in the Data/Morgue folder.
+Press Confirm on the Status screen and then Up/Down to view additional explanation for each line of displayed info.
Gameplay Changes
+New combat system: Combo
   +Gain gold at the end of a level based on combo meter value
   +Hitting enemies builds combo meter
   +Not hitting an enemy for long enough decays combo meter
   +Getting hurt rapidly decays combo meter
   ? Rationale: Time-based gold rewards after fights put pressure on the player to move forward, but weren't the right solution for every fight. The real thing I want to discourage is waiting around for the stars to align for a perfect opening, but I didn't want to simultaneously punish being careful or being weaker than average and thus never being able to make it in time for a bonus. The combo meter's decay time is set so that you won't exceed it if you're normally running around, but you just barely might if you hesitate too long or chicken out of an opportunity.
+Mutation system implemented. Gain them by being a mutant or buying mutation items from shops.
+Attacking an enemy from below awards significantly less gold on kill. Ankle biting isn't lucrative!
   ? Rationale: Hitting an enemy from below on a ladder or from below go-through-ground is one of the most simultaneously effective and un-fun strategies out there. This discouragement might not be enough, but it's a step in the right direction.
+Hitboxes and hurtboxes of all enemies separated. Their 'attackable' regions are now larger than their 'damaging' regions, in general.
   ? Rationale: Fixes ugly cases where visually clawing an enemy's sprite wouldn't inflict damage since their collision box was smaller than that, which was necessary at points for tall enemies like knights and mages to fit into one-space gaps. Now that it's separated, you can claw them in their heads and they can walk under small clearances, no problem.
~Curses now bind equipped relics. These relics can't be unequipped until the curse wears off (by gaining experience).
~An indicator shows where the player is at the start of each level.
Dungeon Changes
+New branch: The Swamp
   +Replaces the Ruins. You'll have to find out how to reach it yourself.
   +Full of poisonous traps and new enemies such as the Drake, Ogre Jelly, and Rogue.
+Many, many more relics and spells added.
+Significantly more level maps added.
+Monsters can now be 'plus-ified', giving them a '+' at the end of their name and increasing their overall nastiness.
+Certain Monsters can now be 'huge-ified', making them bigger, healthier, and stronger.
+Altars can now be found around the dungeon. Interact with one to view the description and powers for a god, and join them if you wish. Each confers unique benefits that will make it worth your while.
   +Five gods added: The Shining One, The Three, St. Poison, Tyrant, and Enthor Faelor.
+Shops have made their debut in the dungeon. Interact with them to view and purchase relics with your hard-earned gold.
+Tips and Tricks are now displayed upon death. 44 unique tips are currently implemented.
+Coins are scattered on the ground throughout the dungeon now. Someone should really pick them up!
+New trap: Spike trap. Dangerous spikes shoot up from the ground with consistent timing.
+New trap: Slime trap. Balls of poisonous slime fall from a slimy point on the ceiling with consistent timing.
+Stationary poison mushrooms added, which can be destroyed. Release a cloud of spores upon destruction!
~Generally, enemy HP has been raised and their attack speed and frequency has been increased.
   ? Rationale: This is in response to the player now having mobility, much faster attack speed, and many more ways to deal with enemies in general.
~The Jumpshroom's spore pattern has been reworked to enhance the way interactions with the enemy play out.
   ? Rationale: This enemy was super boring to fight before. Now, you at least have to perform some weaving in/out of their attacks to hit them.
~Skeloses now occasionally gain a large burst of speed, signified by slowing down beforehand. Their explosions also leave behind dangerous projectiles that must be avoided.
   ? Rationale: This enemy was pretty easy, and the explosion almost never hit. Now it will prove less trivial, but not super powerful still.
Player Changes
+Monsters can now be 'stomped' in traditional platformer fashion. Damage dealt per stomp is dependent on Strength.
   ? Rationale: Not being able to bounce was a disappointing weakness in the overall feel of the game. Bouncing won't replace your attack, but it will increase your angles of approach for many scenarios.
+Hit an enemy with the tip of your claws to deal bonus damage based on Dexterity and apply extra hitstun.
+Hold up or down while attacking to perform an angled attack.
+Hold the attack button to perform a charge attack. Deals bonus damage based on Strength.
+The player can now be launched upon taking a large enough amount of damage (More Strength will help resist this launching effect).
   +While launching, use Left/Right to slightly influence your trajectory.
   +Right before hitting the ground, press Down to attempt to recover. Pressing the button with good timing results in a quick recovery and long invincibility. Failure means much shorter invincibility.
~Air/Ground horizontal/vertical momentum during attacks restored.
   ? Rationale: Freezing in mid-air really killed the flow of movement. Now you can zip around to your heart's content while attacking.
~Lag after attacks reduced to the point of almost complete removal.
   ? Rationale: Waiting around for an attack to refresh for three seconds wasn't fun or meaningful. All the rest of the changes in this section generally stem from tackling this truth. The player can now attack freely which really makes the game feel more kinetic.
~Damage formula for attacks modified. Dexterity now most directly governs single attack damage. Strength's forte is single devastating charge attacks.
   ? Rationale: With the huge wait time after an attack gone, Dexterity and Strength didn't have a meaningful difference. Since Dexterity should be about a flurry of blows, it became the 'attack as much as possible' stat to have, and Strength gained the role of single, powerful blows. Strength now lends itself to high risk, high reward playstyles and heavily rewards knowing your enemies inside and out. In short, it's harder but more rewarding!
~The HP/MP of each class was generally increased.
~Walk speed increased significantly. Walk turnaround time increased.
   ? Rationale: New players walk all the time, and seldom run. This is fine of course, since it gives you more control. But when running was literally double the speed of walking and everything was balanced around it, walking was one of the least useful things in the game. Now walking is still situational, but much quicker so that new players won't get stomped quite as hard and running won't feel quite as jolting. Walking can also now be used to turn on a dime without moving at all (super useful for landing behind enemies and not wanting to bump into them as you turn to attack).
~Generous windows added to the slide dodge and duck animations to cancel into a walk/run/attack/jump/ladder climb.
   ? Rationale: Slide dodge can now be integrated into movement seamlessly, whereas before it had a lot of lag at the end. The challenge with the dodge should be managing to space and time it properly at all, not trying to figure out if you'll be safe on the other end of it for half a second.
~Attack windup dramatically reduced.
   ? Rationale: This windup was just a nuisance that made attacking feel more sluggish.
~A window to cancel a spell cast animation into an attack has been added.
   ? Rationale: Berserkers mistakenly casting spells can do the right thing and give up on them now.
~Control while running dramatically improved. Can now turn around on a dime.
   ? Rationale: Just to make baiting out an attack easier, so you don't have to start your turnaround early lest you carom into something.
~Attacking on ladders is now possible.
~Gained minor invincibility during the downswing of an attack.
~Migrated elemental resistances to be pip-based (discrete), instead of continuous.

Let me know how you fare!

 

Project is basically dead for various reasons, but I've gone on to work on better things! Also, the general idea of this game will probably see a refined revival at some point, since I think there's a niche for it.

If anyone's interested, I can put up a final demo that has many new things in it, but still only three floors.

Well, 1 isn't a prime number either. They've been toying with us since 2002.

Bought this game a while back. It's really fun, but quite difficult. That's probably a fairly common opinion! A few notes, gripes, etc. Spoiler tagging just to be safe:

I feel like tread/leg armor is so good that having a bit of it is almost necessary. It's basically weightless, heatless armor with comparable stats, and it's much more versatile as a slot since it can become propulsion for you at any time as well. I'd like to assert that having armor is necessary, as is being low-weight, so this is the cure-all for what is usually a catch-22. I'll back up my reasoning to some degree.
Not having the safety buffer found in armor means your actual propulsion, supply, or weapons get blown off commonly enough that you need a huge inventory or armor to get from stockpile to stockpile without running out of something crucial. Huge inventory = armor = weight. I'll get to why accepting that weight isn't the best in the next paragraph. You can risk not having protection, but then you swear yourself to the gods of random generation to not lose things, or to not get into a tooth-and-nail encounter when low, or to find the next stockpile in a timely fashion. Having replenishable armor that you can find on everything that moves in the game significantly lessens your dependence on these contingencies. Also, it makes you lose crucial parts less often in combat which effectively increases your damage output since you don't have to spend turns reassembling.
As for keeping yourself low-weight, I don't think it's as necessary as having armor, but there are certain unavoidable scenarios that being fast for can mitigate a huge portion of the danger from. I'm talking about finding yourself cornered with the only option being to run past or fight a swarm of patrolling robots or similar. This happens quite a lot unless you stick to the wide open areas, in which case you're liable to just get ganged up on anyway. If slow, you can't really choose where the engagement happens and may end up getting triple-teamed whereas you could have lured them to a door if fast (you could lure while slow but expect to take 2-3x the onslaught in the process)
I think there are other valid builds that can be slow or unarmored (like maybe raising an army, hacking around, or stealth), but they seem to rely on contingencies and more luck than just slotting a ton of propulsion and enjoying the increased survivability.
Anyway I like the power level conferred by having this as an option, I just feel like the other options are a bit undertuned with respect to it, leading to some feeling of the illusion of choice at points.

Speaking of illusion of choice, some parts are just so terrible that I'd never consider using them even if I have an open utility slot because they're not worth the 10 matter. The thermal converter for example, unless there's some way to inflict thermal damage on yourself I just don't see it ever being useful even if it recouped 100% of the damage taken as energy. I would recommend identifying these weaker items and doing something about them. Now, differing power levels are good for variety, but that difference is already present intra-class so it's not particularly meaningful to have a further difference inter-classes since doing so just makes an entire class terrible regardless of the power ramp present for it. They don't have to be super powerful in the end, but they should at least match their rating level in overall power and have at least a few scenarios where a sane person would consider using them if nothing else. Bonus points for not having desperation be a reason for an imagined use case

I made it my furthest ever today (to -1) and was right at what I assumed to be the end vault, with reinforced walls and huge colossi guarding them. I had a nova cannon so I decided to circle around it and blast through, but for no telegraphed reason the inner walls of the vault were unbreakable, so I took a whole bunch of crushing damage and lost a ton of parts by seeming divine intervention on the architect of that miserable entrance's part, and ended up being too wounded to break through all the blast gates before my weapon was blown off and I accepted my slow demise. It was quite disappointing, and if you just made those inner walls look different or something, that would be nice. Death by divine intervention is never fun!

I also lost once in Warlord by deciding to hang around and help the cause, which was apparently a terrible idea since robots poured in endlessly depleting every resource in the base until Warlord and the fake(?) God Mode joined the fray, dying unceremonious deaths as I cowered in the throne room until I tried to make a break for it but got swarmed. It wasn't just a bit strange that at the exact time the player visits, this huge story-pivotal invasion happens apropos of nothing, instead of what you'd expect (a routine fight of some sort, since the NPCs seemed calm about it all).

I forgot to get the screenshot, but I was in Mines I believe, in an exit vault that had a whole bunch of either batteries or matter pods in a big grid, and the vault seemed to touch the edge of the map on the right side such that instead of walls there was just unlabeled, uninteractable blackness out in plain sight. I don't know if this is known, but it was a bit jarring to look at. Maybe consider just making the outer edge of the map look like a different type of wall and note that it's indestructible, since that would make more sense to players than just nothingness, I feel.


Well, that's all I can think of to write about now. I had a lot more things to mention thought up, but these seemed the most pertinent. Thanks for making a great game, and I'll win eventually!

218, but something is definitely very wrong with the speed increments...

Nice puzzles! I didn't have time to play all of the sample levels, but they felt generally pretty enjoyable and finding the perfect solution was fun (though in general I feel like the enjoyment derived from trying for a perfect solution is inversely proportional to the difficulty of a level).

Your philosophy for a puzzle game is spot-on and resonates with the design principles in some of my favorite puzzle games like hana/jelly no puzzle. I do think that you downplayed one aspect that carries a lot of weight too, which is simply the base idea. It dictates the overall number and complexity of puzzle solving principles the player can be expected to learn. I think your specific formula is good but shy of awe-inspiring due to a generally limited freedom that comes along with tandem movement. At any rate, the idea was executed well and I always like to see more puzzles with this philosophy (which is why I made one with the same basic idea in mind, you can check my signature for more info on that).

edit: also the move limit is fine by me, since it seemed pretty generous and a set of moves that exceeded it usually contained inadvertent 'loops' of several moves that returned the puzzle state back to a previous form, so having users consciously avoid such situations is not a bad thing in my mind.

It is true that you'll always miss out on a small amount of your texture if you're not using power of two sizes, but with very large pages the size loss starts to become negligible. How large a final texture page will be probably depends on many factors, but I couldn't imagine them getting much larger than 2048x2048.



Note that for 24x24, the overhang waffles between 8 and 16 pixels, so efficiencies come in pairs. For a small sheet, you may lose over 10% of your size, but if it gets to max size then you lose less than 1%. Ultimately, you have to ask if this loss is worth it - to me, it seems to almost certainly be a small issue that should take the backseat to a critical decision like the artistic framework for your game.

Kirby Super Star had a 24x24 grid, and it really does fill a nice gap of having more detail but not feeling overly large.



As for resizing, I am not sure why 24x24 would be an issue in your mind. What are you using that can't perform a simple doubling of the size? Even if it only allows changing size in units of 8, 24 is a multiple of 8 and everything should work anyway, no?

As far as I know, there is no way in GM Studio to implement any variadic scripts. There are workarounds, of course. You could fill all the arguments like you did, but that's not ideal. In your case, I might recommend just sending in one string with a separator token delineating separate blocks of text, and then just parse it at the start of the script. Something like:

Code:

conversation_text(
 "Hello
  Hi"
)

(In this case the delineator would be the newline token and you could cut out the whitespace until the next token. This would be easier to look at but trickier to implement.

The even easier alternative is for the function to just keep track of some state so that repeated calls add to the conversation. Like:

Code:

conversation_text("Hello")
conversation_text("Hi")

But if you found something better, I'm all ears!

Hey, so Gum+ is currently available as part of a bundle on itch - link here:

https://itch.io/b/159/play-for-peru

You can get effectively the game for half the price, along with tons of other great games, and all proceeds go directly towards helping with disaster relief in Peru.

In other news, I am working towards pushing out a small update that will fix and refine some levels with incorrect score goals. That should be out as soon as I can manage it!

There's always www.beepbox.co for small stuff. The interface is very simple, which makes it my go-to for just messing around. It also runs from your web browser and any work is instantly sharable, so that's nice.

For a taste, here's something I made recently in it.

x and y should not be substituted with your center coordinates, they are the variables that you plot the circle with in the usual way by finding all solutions to the equation. The full equation for a circle is (x-h)^2 + (y-k)^2 = r^2, where (h,k) denotes the center of your circle.

thing is, racism doesn't negatively affect white people

That sounds racist to me! So basically any other country and race, except whites, can be hurt by "racism" ...

It's so easy to believe this with the view you and I have of the world in the very short time we as an individuals have lived on it, but you have to take these things in a historical context. If all races had coexisted equally since the dawn of time, then this sort of reasoning would make sense. But that's not how things went, and still to this day the pangs of slavery, segregation, and so on saturate the contexts of our conversations. When discussing racism, it is meant in the historical sense (prejudice against non-whites), not the literal sense (singling out a race) that people like to conflate it with as a reductio ad absurdum. So no, whites cannot be harmed by this historical racism, since they were never the targets. And since we're not a post-racist society, it's still worthwhile to discuss racism in these terms since that context still very much affects the way of the world today. I don't think a 'fuck whites' attitude is constructive though, because it makes us forget that we are talking about an ever-changing body of people within each race, so whites will not be the same black-subjugating body of people they were decades ago, but even so they are still (knowingly or otherwise) enjoying the advantages of being white and oppressing other races through age-old systems and inbuilt prejudices that won't just vanish overnight. Anyway, whites are not having any rights stripped from them and hate crimes against blacks still far outnumber hate crimes against whites (the point there is that no disproportionate amount of hatred is manifesting in harmful ways against whites at the moment, the disproportion still lies against blacks as it has historically). So if you are feeling distress about the changing times, consider that it might simply be of this variety.

Someone posted an article a while back that explained the mindset of Trump voters - a lot of them are people in crumbling towns in middle america that feel disenfranchised because they're watching something close to their very existence wither away. I can sympathize with that angle, but I can't sympathize with the notion that Trump is their hero, or even cares about those people... his agenda certainly won't help them whatsoever, and his platform is so vile that we'll be paying the economic, social, and environmental costs for years to come. But a lot of people voted based solely on a promise written in small print: "'Make America Great Again' - yes, we want that!" without any inspection of the subtleties.

Yeah, yuck. Hope there is some way to disable it for users at the least.

I decided to just refresh the page whenever I thought of it instead since I am supremely lazy, and it just paid off! A couple more slots open right now if anyone else is interested.

I need to try this out. Someone notify me if the beta restocks!

I've decided to create pseudo-objects using a 2D array of enumerators (GM doesn't allow for anything bigger than 2D arrays). I've effectively decided to use the first dimension of the array as an identifier of sorts. This is basically the skill name. the second dimension holds all of the necessary information (description, requirements, etc...). If I come up with a better way to tackle this problem I'll most certainly come back to it and redo it, but for now this seems manageable.

You can mimic this behavior with a data structure, maybe a map or list. https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/data%20structures/index.html
Basically, you could store the id of another map inside a map entry. Something like ds_map_find_value( ds_map_find_value( skills, skillIdentifier ), skillParameterIdentifier ).
You can make this easier to type by using an accessor (https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/001_gml%20language%20overview/accessors.html) Though it's probably only a small step up from arrays, honestly.

When I made a somewhat complex rpg in Game Maker, I took a different approach that I found to be pretty decent. So I had some relic objects with various parameters like name, bonuses, etc. that needed to be filled out. I made a script called relic_info that took a relic ID and then a parameter to find (you can use constants to make keeping track of those easier). It looked something like this:

Code:

switch (argument0) {

    case 0: //Dirt Boots
        switch (argument1) {
        
        case rs_name: return "Dirt Boots";
        case rs_worth: return 0.9;
        case rs_hover: return 8;
        case rs_isArmor: return 1;
        case rs_desc: return "Are these really boots, or just a very convincing pile of dirt? Either way, they somehow feel lighter than air..."
        
        }
    break;

...

From there, it was very easy to add information and manage it since everything makes sense organizationally and visually, and all the info for a given thing is in one place. I used this same format for spell information, area information, and basically anything I needed it for since it was a very pain-free solution. It removes the need for array/data structure management, more or less. The downside is that you can't easily modify these return values - but if you're trying to express static things like an item description, you shouldn't need to. Note that there are about 50 of those 'rs_' identifiers, and if the script falls through because the relic didn't have the desired stat modifier, it just returns 0 - that behavior can be handy, too!