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[will72]

Backed you guys on Kickstarter because of the atmosphere and the music. Glad to see this is moving forward!

[One-bit Punch]

A gorgeous-looking game! Love the big sprites too, must be a ton of work to animate but totally worth the effort! 

[Mr. Virus]

thanks :D

How's Stencyl from an audio perspective? Would love to try experiment with a few things but can't code at all.

I don't have a lot of frame of reference since my experience with C2 and game maker are pretty preliminary, but to me it seems as though the audio side of stencyl is pretty basic right now. it's sufficient to do the type of game I'm doing, though, certainly. if you watch the video there's no video editing there, everything you see is just a straight visual/audio rip from the game, even the music that trails in at the end.

if you have specific questions I could attempt to answer them, but suffice it to say I believe the audio features of stencyl to be pretty basic right now.

Ah, no worries . Been toying with the idea of making audio based games (can't do art either ha ha), so was wondering if Stenycl'd be a good jumping in point. As far as I'm aware Game Maker is getting FMOD support at some point soon, so may look to that, or just try to pick up some code/scripting in Unity.

But yeah, looking forward to this! Love Metroidvanias ha ha!

[twotimingpete]

Playing around with some effects ideas again. In this case you see I'm actually showing off a bit how much activity I can get away with using stencyl's surprisingly flexible engine.



note that each spark not only has collision and physics, but is being recolored and resized and rotated by the engine.

[lai-studioguts]

Wow that Gif took a long time to load.  Worth it :D

[twotimingpete]

Wow that Gif took a long time to load.  Worth it :D

oh thanks -- sorry about that, keep in mind that I typically link my embedded gifs out to higher res webm videos which should load ten times faster.

[McMutton]

You certainly picked good games to draw inspiration from; this should turn out fantastically. I do love me an agile protagonist.

Will there be a bunch of different weapons and such that you can equip?

[twotimingpete]

You certainly picked good games to draw inspiration from; this should turn out fantastically. I do love me an agile protagonist.

Will there be a bunch of different weapons and such that you can equip?

there's a basic cannon (incidentally whose ammo automatically recharges after inactivity) mapped by default to the X button on a 360 pad, and a special shot (with ammo that doesn't recharge on its own) mapped to Y. This is meant to mimmick the "light attack/heavy attack" buttons on games like ninja gaiden, only guns instead.

when the game starts, your only special weapon is plasma shot, which is fairly basic, but you can get a number of others and cycle through them in real time. as the game is currently designed none of the special weapons are required to be acquired in order to beat the game, though some (one in particular) can certainly help you get to new areas.

you can also level up by getting experience, which will increase your general attributes (so higher damage numbers and so forth).

[twotimingpete]

dinking around with some animation stuff and replacing old placeholders. in this case, the unit has a walk animation that sort of wobbles along, it doesn't walk at a constant speed.



to make this match up, I programmed his movement speed to be custom set by each frame of animation, so as to make the character look as connected to the ground as I can.

[Noffle]

Glorious particle effects! I really like the art direction, and the attention to little details like having foes move at non-constant speeds.

[twotimingpete]

^ thanks

I'm kind of interested in having an alternate, more explosive death for most enemies if you hit them hard enough -- sort of like you see in fallout 3, where the enemy explodes into a bunch of parts.

I already have various "generic" gibs in my inventory, so I have plenty of stuff to get started working on such a thing.

When an overkill death occurs, first I remove the main sprite from the character and swap it with zombie gibs in roughly the right positions to compose the figure. To help get this dialed in, I froze the gibs in place when they spawn so I could script them out and trial and error until each one is about in the right spot. There are additional sparks and smaller gibs that spray out a bit more haphazardly, as well.





With this done, I apply various forces to the body parts when they spawn to try and make a satisfying kill. This is what I have so far:



It may not be perfect yet, but it's ballpark. If anything is missing I think it's some nice blood sprays, which I am still thinking about how to approach.

[DarkWanderer]

Dude that gib animation is marvelous. Glad to see Ghost Song has a devlog here now by the way

[twotimingpete]

gross enough?



for now maybe the less said about this enemy the better, but I did all his art in one day which is always a nice feeling.

[lai-studioguts]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOhhhh I love the stagger animation on the enemy.
I do agree that when that guys explodes he seems very dry.

[twotimingpete]

yeah, that's quite possible. at the same time I wonder if it almost starts to become a distraction if it's a total bloodbath.

I mean, it's already pretty, er, "active" I guess would be the word:

[DarkWanderer]

Do these enemies have hit boxes? I noticed in that last gif you aimed right at it's face.

[Savick]

Looks super nice so far and I really like the colors overall.

[twotimingpete]

thanks guys -- I could have separate hitboxes for different body parts, it's something I've thought a bit about but for these really lesser weak enemies seems a bit pointless. I like to aim up because I'm sort of making my own fun. Reminds me of old school resident evil games, where you'd get a nice shotgun headshot by aiming up from point blank.

I WILL say, however, that distance plays a dramatic role in shotgun damage. point blank = insane damage and crits, further back = weaksauce.

here's a glimpse at what those dudes do if you don't kill them in time: http://gfycat.com/AcrobaticLinearBoa

[Rolkus]

This looks stunning!

[DarkWanderer]

Well, this not being a precision mouse aiming game, hit boxes would just make head shotting common mooks an annoyance, presuming you'd have to jump & fire to even hit their heads. For bigger boss types I could see it though.

This did make me wonder though, if perhaps the particles from the spread blast could manipulate the momentum/direction the gibs travel in. I.e. crouching & aiming up at the base of one of those guys would make the gibs arc more upwards.
Though upon reexamining the gifs, the gib patterns seem random enough to feel satisfying & unique every time.