[Restrain]

There was an issue with the Thunder Swordsman, his first 2 skills (Hack and Slash) where made so that you would need to alternate them to be able to attack really fast but... it was pretty annoying having to tap the bumpers all the time to attack. So I decided to merge those 2 (because thats what makes sense, so you tap only one button) into a single skill. But then of course this brings up the problem of having a free skill slot.

Soooooo I added a new skill for the Thunder Swordsman:

Restrain


When cast, enemies in a small area around the TS are stabbed with a lightning spear and frozen in place for 3 seconds. Even if they are mid-air, they won't fall until the effect is over.

The idea for this skill is to let the TS deal damage consistently without having to worry too much about enemies near him because of how fragile he is.

Also improved the Shieldmaiden's Ground Slam. Now when cast, the skill is prepared and as soon as the Shieldmaiden is grounded, the skill takes effect and does its thing. The damage and area of effect are increased based on the distance traveled since the skill was cast.



Also when this skill is in effect, the Shieldmaiden becomes immune to fall damage because otherwise it would be very silly.

Having trouble with those pesky torches? Fear not, the Shieldmaiden is here to protect you from harm!



This is still the same Sacrifice skill of the Shieldmaiden but it now has proper visual feedback so you can tell what the hell is going on.

I've improved the UI of the game a little bit so that it looks less ugly. This is still very placeholderish, but it's a step forward in figuring out the UI.

This is the skill bar of a Player




Aaand this is the Player select

Well, I've been working on many different things in the past days.

I decided to lower the tiles size from 16x16 to 8x8, this way I feel I have a lot more freedom because I can do more in the same space. Of course, this change led to a couple of headaches mostly regarding the test level I had already created (had to re do it, not fun).

But well, here it is, this is the same atlas I was using before, but in a version that was made to take advantage of the 8x8 tiles.



I think it finally looks decent :D

I really like the shooting star animations!

Thanks! I think they have an interesting behavior even tho they are a very simple enemy

Well I've implemented this other Minion



It's called Torch, and it's a very basic enemy, they just follow you and hurt you when they touch you.

I've been putting a lot of work into making sure the game and the networking is stable enough and I think it is now. So I'm gonna be adding 1-2 more Minions, 2 more Mini-bosses (including the Sunflower which is still being made) and then the Boss which I have no idea what's it going to be :D

The ShootingStar is done now. Yay!



Their behavior is pretty simple.



They are really easy to kill, if you manage to hit them of course.
And they are not meant to kill a player by themselves, but in groups they can be quite deadly.

I'm working on 2 enemies at the same time basically. This is because one of Polymath's guys is helping me out with the art this time. Expect that enemy to be awesome!

Also, the other enemy I'm working on is not too complex and qualifies more as a Minion. Have I talked about that? I think not so I'll do it right now. There are 3 categories for enemies:

• Minions: Really easy to kill, don't pose much of a threat.
• Mini-Bosses: They are usually impossible or really hard to kill by yourself. They are made to demand players to cooperate in order to beat them without casualties.
• Bosses: Well, this one is pretty self-explanatory. Bosses kick ass, specially yours.

Ok so, the Crusher is a Mini-Boss, can you guess why? . . . YES! It is indeed because it wrecks whomever it is targeting. It's pretty hard to deal with it by yourself, trust me I've tried.

The enemy I'm getting help with is called Sunflower, it's really cool but since it's visual design is not done yet I won't show it right now.

On the other hand, we have the little guy I made which is a Minion and is called ShootingStar (pretty fitting name imo). The visual design for it is not done yet, but since it already looks so cool in-game I wanted to show you:



What you see there is a small cluster of ShootingStars. They don't hit that hard, but they are annoyingly fast which makes them harder to kill.

Following! This is looking good! Love the animation on the new running enemy. Has the whole dragonball arms back thing going

Thanks! I'm glad it looks good

Really cool concept and implementation, wanna play the final version of the game.
Also, I think, the world needs more coop action games!

Yes! The world indeed needs more coop games This one will be really fun!

This guy is all about violence.



I just finished implementing it and it's already hard to deal with by myself so I'll call that a success :D

I'll be fixing a new bug related to skills being cancelled. I still don't know what's going on, but it seems like because of the attack speed of the Crusher, he usually cancels the ThunderSwordsman's attacks and this is causing the player to not be able to use skills until he is hit again. This is because when you use a skill, there is a safety method that forbids the player to use other skills until the first one finishes, and because it was cancelled and didn't finish, I'm guessing something went wrong and the safety method still thinks the skill is ongoing.

Any way I'll be fixing that and also start working on a new enemy :D

Wow this is loads better since the last time I checked in - great progress!

The things you are doing with the smart camera, etc, are much appreciated, and will definitely give you a much better game overall, and better user experience.

Thanks!

And yes the camera is super important for this kind of game so I want it to not get in the way of the experience. Glad it makes sense to add those things

Well good news, the refactorization was a complete success and now the Skills system is much clearer and optimized! YAY!

Also, I'm 70% done with this guy, check it out

Well, while trying to implement the Crusher (which is a more fitting name than Hunter) in the game I came to the realization that the way characters, animations and skills interact with eachother is really crappy. This means that, as a programmer, I must then perform the sacred ritual of refactorization and rewriting a lot of code that is working perfectly fine for the sake of a tidier code.

Will it take me 1 day? 2? I don't know. I hope I don't end up breaking the whole game and that I can finish this quickly so I can have a quicker pipeline for new enemies.

While that piece of boring code gets done, entertain yourself with this neverending chase. The Crusher sure is persistent.

The new enemy I'm working on for Casmage is training really hard. It wants to get stronger while I finish the rest of its animations

The Hunter is training really hard to beat the players! It just can't wait to punch them till they stop moving.

New enemy! And it's not a Slime yay! :D

I call it Hunter (although I'd like to give it a better name, I think it's too simple). It moves really fast and its job is to beat the crap out of the player with lowest HP.

The idea behind the Hunter is that the player that it is chasing should just try to keep running while the other players kill the Hunter, since it will always just try to kill the player with lowest HP.



This was just a test to see how it fit in the game. Like if it stood out enough from the background and how did it look compared to a player. Because of that I haven't made the animations yet but soon I will!

Well, since I finished world building and now have a very good idea of how everything in the game fits together, I can now do a better job making the castle areas and stuff.

I'm starting with what I call the Fire Magic Faculty, you can look at it as the equivalent of the fire temple in a zelda game.



This is just a "level" I put together for the sole purpose of seeing if it fits and how the characters look in it. It's just a test.

Of course this is not a finished version, but it's somewhere to start. As I make the enemies for this area I will iterate over the atlas to add new stuff and improve the existing ones.

So I tried to do a better version of what I had for the tileset, and after meeting with the Polymath guys I realized that I should be dedicating more time to answering questions related to how this Magic School actually looks like. I spent some time working on this but I see it more as an excersice rather than a final version of the tileset.



Right now I'm gonna be focusing on figuring out what does the Magic School actually looks like before I tackle the tileset again because well, if I don't know how it looks like and why it's gonna be a lot harder :D

while I work on the world building, which is proving to be insanely fun btw, I'm working on a new sprite atlas for my test levels since... well, It's no secret that I HATE the placeholder tiles I made and that I've been using since forever.

So, I'm doing my best to step out of my comfort zone and make an atlas that is at least decent according to my standards.

This is the second day I've been working on it (I accidentally deleted the first one, yay me). It is nowhere near something interesting, but I think it's a good place to start. Notice those redish blocks? Oh yeah, it might not look like it but that's stepping way out of my comfort zone for these kinds of things. Why? Well it seems like I'm only comfortable using blue?... or at least cold colors.

Any way, I'll be posting a daily progress on this and by the end of this cycle I should have the sprite atlas of one of the levels of the castle. Oh yeah, I haven't talked about that, mainly because I'm still figuring out the zones the castle's gonna have. This one will be called the Magic School and it's supossed to be a place where you know... people learn magic and so I'm expecting it to be a very colorful place. I have absolutely no idea how am I going to get there but I'll figure something as I go.

Here, have this super-generic small tileset of bricks and more bricks, and a window apparently.