Gotta post.  Gotta follow.  Lots of cool art and animation in here.

This looks neat.  I like the art style (and the quality of it,) and the shooting mechanics and enemy movement/attacks seem well thought out.

[Latest progress:]

Latest progress:

I have recently felt stalled a bit when making new enemies/objects because I get hung up on what the art should look like.  I realized this was slowing me down so I resolved to rapid prototype a bunch of new ideas without worrying about art until after the gameplay is fun -- this also means I'm free to cut the enemy without guilt if I realize it was a bad idea. Part of proving that it's fun is seeing if I can make enough interesting rooms that incorporate the enemy/object in novel ways.  So by having a functional prototype i can actually play with different room ideas in the level editor and see if they work for real, not just in my imagination. I'm just using a simple colored square or circle with a letter or symbol to indicate the object type.  I set it up so i just need two lines of code to do that.



Here's one of the new enemies below, the "Swarm" (placeholder name) which uses flocking behavior to move as a living mass and chase down the player once they see her. There are various ways to deal with them, including using bombs to take out a bunch at a time, and using a torch to keep them at bay:







Finally a funny story -- I was really worried that my code was super unoptimized because with flocking turned off, the game ran 3.5ms faster than with flocking enabled.  This is just for 20 enemies doing the routine.  That meant that almost 40% of my frame was spent on flocking logic, which is really just some for loops with vector operations inside!  Finally i realized the real problem -- the flocking code rotated the sprite, which is unrotated by default.  The sprite included text -- and apparently canvas text rendering is much slower when rotated!  So just by leaving the sprite at default rotation, the perfomance problem went away.  This won't be an issue with my final vector art so I don't really need to worry about it.  Though it's a good lesson to use native text sparingly in my game, and never rotate it.

This stuff looks great. Strong zelda 3 vibes.

I've been following for a while, just wanted to say that I love the art style on this.

Did some work recently to art up the various UI screens/menus.

Inventory screen -- shows all weapons and treasures you've collected


Map screen -- shows unvisited rooms, visited rooms, and current room


Quick switch menu for weapons -- hold space and click with a mouse, then release space.  Inspired by radial menus like skyward sword, and Maya

Small update, I recently added the ability to ride your raft over waterfalls.

you can eliminat the ambiguity by storing rectangles as x,y,width,height.

[not]

I like the clean style!
her head is way too big though
water/waterfalls look great! maybe a bit of foam/splash would make them even nicer?
the apples are an interesting choice. but I think the hearts are so universal, they would not stand out as shameless copies.

On the waterfalls, I am overall trying to keep a good balance of detail vs. minimalism, for example if one thing gets too detailed then a lot of other stuff looks too plain by comparison.  But maybe I'll try adding some particles for the spray and see how it feels.

I like the apples! Both the apple icons on the left and the map icon on the right are way too close to the edges of the screen tho IMO. You should make the horizontal margin a bit bigger so that the icons don't lick the edges. It looks like the image has been cropped a bit.

Don't worry, the screenshot is just the contents of the HTML canvas, when you play the game for real it's surrounded by a larger black background, so there is plenty of space around it.

Will you make the editor available to people to make their own campaigns? Kind of like Zelda Classic except less awful?

Releasing the editor is a very strong possibility.  The editor already works well enough for what it does.  I might need to modify the map format to be more compact, and then come up with a good way for people to share quests and an easy way to play custom quests that others have shared.  The nicest way for this to work is a central server where the editor uploads new quests and the game can browse the server and download the quests you want to play.  The crappiest way is that you zip the whole game with the new quest file and people download it, unzip it, and open the webpage from their filesystem.

Also, Zelda Classic is one of the reasons I started this game project.  I downloaded it a few years ago, started messing around making a new quest for it, and then realized I might as well try making my own zelda clone, and here I am. 

The door perspective on the door frame silhouettes seems a bit odd to me, makes the floor pop up a bit.

It seems like it's more the light casting onto the ground that feels weird to me. Either way, the floor feels weird with that door at the bottom.

Those color palettes are awesome! How hard was it to implement that transition feature?

I kind of agree with both of you guys on the doors -- the way the light from outside spills into the room is still not right to me. I have done some additional iteration on it but haven't found anything I like yet.  Will keep trying.

It's been a while but I think the transition feature probably took 2-3 days. I think the basic logic of copying the two rooms to static images and then sliding them around was pretty straightforward, and even adding the iris effect wasn't too hard.  Most of the annoyance was getting the player to animate on top of the static images, including clipping into the shape of the doors.

[Health Meter Iteration]

Health Meter Iteration

I wanted to replace the heart meter with something else, since I'm a clone, but not a shameless one.  I had various ideas like plain circles, flowers, and apples.  So i just made a bunch of attempts --



I actually feel the circles were pretty nice from a minimalist standpoint.  If it was only a health meter, i might go with that.  However, the same icons need to be usable as pickups in the world to refill health, and pickups that extend your max health.  Circles would not be clear enough in those other contexts. As for flowers, I didn't like any of my attempts.

Finally I got going on the apples.  It took me a while to try different combinations of stem, leaf, shadow, etc.  I think stem + leaf is too detailed.  Stem alone looks like a cherry. Leaf alone works.  Then i needed to figure out which elements of the silhouette were necessary to look like an apple.  A key lesson is the top curve needs a dip in the middle.

BUT THEN....



WTF. So it turns out that photoshop and HTML5 canvas don't rasterize bezier paths the same.  This is the first piece of art where I was picky enough about small details to notice (since I'd been tweaking the same paths for a while.) You can see above i mirrored them so you can compare them closer.  I spent a lot of time making sure that it wasn't a problem with my import tool. It isn't.  I have not solved this, but i basically tweaked the photoshop file so that it looks wrong, but correct in game. In the long run I guess I need to write a native javascript path editor, or just learn to not care so much about individual pixels.

Anyway, here is the new health meter, along with improved forest tiles (some trees are lighter for variety), snakes with wings (so they look more mythological), and other art tweaks.

New progress:

I created a simple system that I call "triggers" to support the puzzle aspects of gameplay.  Basically each room can have 1 trigger condition and 1 trigger outcome.  This system covers the interactions between entities, which are not inherent to any specific entity, and not universal behavior for that entity.  As a counterexample, since braziers always light up dark rooms, that behavior is part of the brazier code instead of a trigger.  Triggers are more like the "level scripting" of this game.

This is the editor interface for it:



I can add as many new conditions and outcomes as I want, to support more one-off magical events I want (e.g. the whistle making the pond dry up in Legend of Zelda)

And here is a simple "press button to open door" puzzle in one of my cave rooms:



In theory the state change can persist after you leave the room and come back, using that last checkbox in the editor, but i haven't coded this part yet.  The purpose of that feature is to prevent people from having to solve tedious puzzles multiple times.  I haven't implemented it yet because I'm not sure if I will have any tedious puzzles I'm also not yet sure if I will ever need more than one trigger in a room.  So far I haven't, so the editor doesn't support that yet, either.

This looks cool.  There aren't a lot of these turn-based puzzle games around nowadays with this much effort put into the art and presentation.

I like the variety of results you get from the same player action (melt, hover, style hair).  Also the cuteness of the hair dryer and the blob people.  I guess you could also stand on a floating ice cube and blow horizontally to travel across water. (and if you fall in the water you'd get electrocuted of course.)

Not serious comment:

- how does the grass grow so quickly into newly-drilled caves?

Serious comments:

- what i like about this game is the idea of two phases, where player choices during phase 1 affects what they can do in phase 2.  Seems like interesting things can happen such as players racing to drill a valuable tile.

- idea for a tower construction piece -- a bomb tile that when placed, destroys all other tiles on the same horizontal row (thereby shortening the opponents towers if they are taller than yours)

- from your animated gif it seems like the most important activity of your game, drilling upwards, is impossible.  Unless you can jump up and then drill while in mid-air, how can you go up more than 1 tile from the starting point?  Are there going to be a ton of air pockets to make it possible?

Ah i see now that it is not a special gun, but a plant that grows outwards when shot.  Still looks cool though

The plant gun (goo gun?) is awesome.  I can see a lot of other mechanics building off of that core mechanic.  (flamethrower to burn back the green stuff if you accidentally grew too much of it, flame hazards in the world that will wipe out your green platforms, parasites/enemies that are attracted to the green goo, maybe a life cycle where the green stuff blooms and then disintegrates over time, so you have to move quickly, etc.)

Setting and character are colorful and fun. 

Following.

Both the art and the gameplay/animations look pitch-perfect 90's arcade shooter.

One question though, is the main character really going to be a bald naked guy?

I love all the art and animations in this.  Looks great.