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[The Monster King]

today the monster king made some sprites and put them in the game

hours missed are catching up (though not yet those were a busy thursday and friday)

[Belimoth]

Fuck yeah, finish that shit.

[Chef Boyardee]

Doing more work today! Again on the alt characters.
While working on all of that stuff I decided to cut half of the alt characters I had thought of, picking the six more interesting/different ones and merging some of the concepts together. The goal here is that every one of them feels like it changes the game enough to go through it again.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo

[Craig Stern]

Cutting down a game's scope is almost never a bad idea. Keep at it!

[FrankieSmileShow]

Worked some more on these characters. Protobot is almost all done, I got some good ideas to make it feel different. I haven't found a good way to implement the whole "breaking down" idea yet though. Not sure I'm going to keep it. I think its one of those ideas that sound cool when explained but aren't really fun. You know. One of thoooose. Maybe ill come up with something, who knows!

[JMickle]

i like the idea of him being a speedrun character because you HAVE to speedrun him.

[Xion]

you could have him only get worse if you do well? So like, he starts out super powerful and stuff, but if you just blasty-blast through every enemy and rack up mad points he'll get bad super fast, but if you go easy on the trigger and only kill who you need to you could make it pretty far without getting very bad.

I don't think it should ever become 'unplayable', though. That doesn't sound fun it sounds dumb.

Or maybe collecting powerups instead of actually giving you powerups takes them away?

[Belimoth]

you could have him only get worse if you do well? So like, he starts out super powerful and stuff, but if you just blasty-blast through every enemy and rack up mad points he'll get bad super fast, but if you go easy on the trigger and only kill who you need to you could make it pretty far without getting very bad.

Every time his shots connect with an enemy, the shots ricochet back and damage him.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Yeah I'm not sure. I'm still thinking this through. I got some ideas, the problem is making the whole breaking down thing be noticeable, yet making it not be just horrible and frustrating. Also, protobot is the first alternate robot you get, so making it be shitty as a joke isnt a very good idea! Im trying things out with weapons malfunctionning, but theres always the problem that you dont really notice it while fighting for your life, unless the breakdown is a big deal, in which case its just kind of a dick move. Its really just that, finding the right balance between something you barely notice and something that makes the game frustrating. Or theres always making it be horribly frustrating but making up for it in other ways.

[Bandages]

Could you play around with traction? Maybe it's just a clunky robot that needs a lot more control and precision to move around

Protobot could be the luigi to your primary robot's mario

[FrankieSmileShow]

Well right now its one thing im doing with it, its why hes got a one wheel thing going on. He rolls a little bit/has traction, and when he moves, he gets an angle which moves the aim of the gun, making it a little awkward to shoot if youre not used to it. But theres no progressive part to it yet, its just how that robot moves.

[Xion]

you could make it happen on a predictable cycle. Like have a little counter that starts at 50 or 100 or something, and every time you jump it goes down, and when it reaches 0 your tire busts and your movement becomes bumpy and your aiming gets even worse, and then the counter goes back up to 100, and then it counts down every time you use an alt weapon, and when it reaches 0 your alt weapon thing goes KaBaNg and now alt weapons fly wildly when you shoot them (both a blessing and a curse?) or use more ammo for each shot or something.

When dudes first play it they won't know what the counter is counting down to so you can still have that bit of unknown gaginess to it, but at the same time it won't be random or unanticipated and if you know what's coming you can plan for it by, for example, making sure to beat this boss that requires precise aiming and movement before your tire busts, or hoarding as much ammo as you can before your gun busts, shit like that.

The counter doesn't even have to be numerical, or a hud element at all, it could just be something like, when you land from a jump some particles pop out, and depending on the color/quantity of the particles you can tell how close you are to your next malfunction. Maybe you gradually start smoking over time that also gives you a fairly accurate read.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Yeah. the first prototype of it worked in a way similar to that, but it wasnt specific actions tied to a specific malfunction, it was an overall "condition" counter that went down along with time, and whenever you jumped, fired, got hit and used a subweapon, with getting hit affecting it by a lot more. The problem was that even putting lots of special effects around it (I ended up even making it spawn like, smoke and an explosion animation on the robot at the breaking point), you still sometimes dont notice it. Theres just too much going on in the screen usually, and youre just not paying attention to your guy. Later you just notice, wait, my dude is different, what the hell is going on? And you wont realize like, what caused this to happen, when did it happen. I need something to make it obvious that this last jump caused the tire to break off, that this last shot made your weapons burn up. I want this to be a surprise; if its not done correctly, its going to just be confusing instead.

Im trying things out right now with the Hud, I had a command line HUD panel idea that will probably help a lot with that player feedback problem. It will look like its just a useless visual detail at first, giving you obvious feedback like POWER CELL COLLECTED when you pick up one, and pointless flavor details about your surroundings. But then suddenly it would start going all AROOOGA and giving you red lines of error messages, normal feedback messages getting weird and corrupted, eventually the panel itself having a blue screen of death and maybe even like, breaking and falling off the screen.

[FawfulBeans]

you could always pause the game for a couple of seconds, make the whole screen dark except for the character and then play the breaking animation.

[Lurdiak]

*emerges from pile of chocolate wrappers*

Huh? What? Oh yeah. I took a day off yesterday, but I worked on the beginnings of a flying enemy's AI during the weekend and also made a mock-up of the title screen. I more or less finalized the flying enemy tonight, giving him a pattern where he flies until he "sees" the player and dive bombs, then turns around and tries to find the player again. I'll probably need to tweak the timing for balance reasons later on but it's fully functional. It's the most complex AI I've made yet!

Oh, here's the title screen mock-up. Obviously the "Hulk" part will say "Guts" in the actual game.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Not much to talk about today, Im finalizing protobot's subweapons. The special heads-up display for protobot is working, too. Doing a lot of difficulty tweaking with him, the problem is that subweapons make him horribly powerful, and having no subweapons make him especially vulnerable. Trying to attenuate the difference between the two a little bit right now.

[Lurdiak]

Fine tuned the patterns of the flying enemy, coded in a functional title screen (with placeholder graphics), fixed a few glitches related to enemy deaths, created functional enemy spawning cues (so that you can't get shot by someone 20 screens over), fiddled around with some extremely basic level design to test the flexibility of the gameplay I have so far and to let me understand how I should design around Guts Man's powers, created some basic puzzles, added a functional health bar.

I keep going back and forth on wether or not I should give Guts Man a means of attacking when he's got no boulders. What he does is spawn boulders he can use as platforms and as shields, and then pick them up to turn them into projectile weapons that break into smaller projectiles upon impact. The issue is that the delay between spawning and picking up the boulder is a massive amount of time compared to how traditional mega man games let you shoot pellets instantly. I am trying to create a different feel here, but I'm worried players might feel frustrated by Guts Man's lack of split second offense.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Alright. Protobot is done, except for maybe some minor tweaking, he might be a bit too strong.
Also I did something really stupid yesterday. I lost about 5 hours of fine tuning work on protobot when I overwrote my project file. I had two instances of Game Maker open for some reason and absent-mindedly saved the older of the two windows when I closed it. I think I re-done most of the fixes and tweaks I had lost, but I probably forgot one or two.


Next up is the spider robot.


A very small one, about the height of the other robots when they're crouching.
Its going to have kind of a ninja thing going on. Moves quickly, jumps high. Main attack is very powerful, but its slow, and has more or less a melee range. To fight safer you need to use subweapons, which is stuff like shurikens (thrown straight forward), throwing daggers(thrown with a slight arc), etc. The subweapons are a lot cheaper for him. Pressing down and attacking activates a shield that lasts 10 seconds and eats up a lot of power, which you can use to get close to enemies and stab safely. He also has a lot less health than the other robots. The pilot is some sort of ninja spider guy. Hud is going to have a mix of ninja and spiderish things.  This robot is almost done already, I just need to fine tune it right now and give him his own heads up display graphics/layout. I might add a little to the sprite, like dressing up the actual robot with stealthy black cloth and giving it little sandals or something.

[FrankieSmileShow]

work in progress, the heads up display for the spider ninja guy. Its not ninjay enough yet, ill fit some lil knives and ninja stars in there somehow.

[Lurdiak]

Coded projectile deflection for shielded enemies, added some sound effects, fiddled with screen format. I tried working on some tilesets but there are too many obstacles right now so I shelved it.