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[Canotico]

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!

[Canotico]

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.

[Canotico]

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.

[Canotico]

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

[Pixel Noise]

I really like the shooting star animations!

[Canotico]

I really like the shooting star animations!

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

[Canotico]

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

[Canotico]

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

[Canotico]

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.

[Canotico]

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.

[Canotico]

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.

[Canotico]

I've added a really nice thing to the game! Dynamic Collisions!

This lets me do things like these:



Meaning that players can now travel in moving platforms and even walljump from them given the right conditions! Yay!

And also this is a thing that can happen:



Whenever you get pushed by a collider into another one you get squashed, which is obviously instakill.

So there, new stuff for the platforming of the game which I think was necessary to make the game as dynamic and I intended it to be. This will let me add many different and fun stuff into the game just to mess with the players and challenge them a bit more :D

[Canotico]

Just as an informational post, I haven't been able to post any progress in the last couple of days because I was moving. And I still need a couple more days before I can resume development on Casmage.

As soon as I resume development I'll make a post here, until then, I'll come up with as many ideas as I can since that's the most I can do right now :D

[Canotico]

Wellp, I've finally reached a point that I can call "normal" for Casmage's development.

I still don't have something I could call a desk but that will come in time. The important thing is that I've resumed development on Casmage.

I've thought a lot about the game's current scope and direction, and I'm going to change a few things, for better of course. The thing is that I don't feel the current state of the game is representative of the experience I want to create, and that would be ok if the game was in an earlier stage, but I do think that by this point I should already be able to tell whether the gameplay is fun or not.

So, taking that into account, I will focus all of the development towards Boss Fights. Why? Because the sole idea of thinking about fighting a giant thing with your friends is already fun, so that's probably where Casmage should be headed right now.

I'm already working on a first boss encounter and dedicating all of my free time to its design and making it as awesome as possible. And trust me, it's gonna be. 

[Canotico]

A lot has changed from the original idea of the game I had, and I actually think that it's because that idea has become clearer and clearer. The game is now purely a cooperative experience of fighting bosses, so lets talk about what this implies for what was already in place:

 - Characters: The characters are there to provide a different kind of gameplay to the player, and this is still the case. The thing is that I've had to change the way I design the skills each character has, mostly because the design's target is no longer "fighting minions, mini-bosses and bosses" but instead just "fighting bosses".
I've also decided to simplify the skills themselves, this is because since the players will be fighting a lot less, they wouldn't have the time to test and learn skills they don't know, and even if they did, it could become a little frustrating.
This means that the skills kit of each character will be simplified and focused towards boss battles. How am I planning on doing that? Well, I'm gonna have a basic purpose for each individual skill, that will be shared across all character. This means that for instance, if we know that the Thunder Swordsman 'A' skill lets him evade an attack, then we can expect that the 'A' skill of the Shieldmaiden will do something similar. This is great because it makes it easier for a player to pick a new character, because they can already predict in some way what's going to happen when using a skill, which is very important when the players don't have too many places to test all of their skills before fighting the bosses.
 - The World: The world is not going to be procedurally generated. Instead, it will be built to offer the players the means to go to each of the boss battles. This means that there's going to be an "exploration" component in the game, but it's secondary.
 - The Enemies: The enemies are all bosses. I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus and Titan Souls.
However, this doesn't mean that all the enemies I've made so far or planned to make are just going to dissapear, I have a few ideas for boss battles that involve lesser enemies attacking the players, and they will be really cool.

It's been a while since my last GIF so here:

[flipswitchx]

Great premise and great animations. Chugga chugga keep it up!

[Canotico]

Great premise and great animations. Chugga chugga keep it up!

Thanks a lot! I will work on this game until my fingers fall off and I have to inevitably hire someone to type for me .... Or you know... until it's finished. I'd like to keep my fingers if possible. 

[Canotico]

Update time! Wohooo! This time its about the characters!

Remember that cool skill I made for the ThunderSwordsman where he fired this really cool beam and stuff? Well it's gone.

But not gone "gone". Let me explain myself here.

Remember I talked about skills having like a basic behavior across all characters so that they would be somewhat predictable? Well, this was the first step towards that.

THE BASIC ATTACK

This is pretty self-explanatory, the basic attack is the way characters have of directly and consistently dealing damage. Nothing odd here (yet).

The Thunder Swordsman has his Hack and Slash and the Shieldmaiden has her Shield Bash. These skills are different in some ways, but they are basically the same, they are both spammable because they have very low cooldowns, and they both deal damage. Awesome, so the player will know that whenever they press the <basic attack button> they will deal damage! I know this seems very obvious but bear with me, trying to make a point here.

Now, we can make the Basic Attack more interesting. Lets add a new behavior that will happen if the player holds the <basic attack button>.

The character will charge up energy, and after a short delay, they will be able to release the stored energy in the form of an awesome beam!!!



COOL! That looks like it deals a lot of damage!

But that's not all! Lets make this even more interesting! Lets add an interaction to the beam itself... Lets make the beams... COLLIDE WITH EACHOTHER... DRAGON BALL STYLE! YEAH!



THIS IS AWESOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME!!!!

The player will be able to increase the lifetime of the beam a bit by tapping the <basic attack button>, but of course they can't make it last forever.

Now, there's no cooperative component to this ability, so lets add one shall we? If you fire your beam and there's an ally already firing one near you, you both fire a single stronger beam. This means that players that charge up their beams and fire them at the same time near eachother will do a pretty powerful beam attack.

All the things above are not dependant on the character but are the common behavior of the basic attack. Different characters will have some tweaks to what the attack actually does and how it does it. But whatever the change, the player can expect that they will deal damage, and that they will fire a beam if they hold the button. It's predictable, and easy to understand.

----

Also, as a side note, the whole idea of the players standing together firing a super strong beam is what drives the design of the boss I'm currently working on. Don't worry, I'll post about it soon enough, but just imagine the last moment of a boss fight being about beating the boss' beam with yours and finally killing it. I think it will be pretty exciting!

[Canotico]

Well well, it's time to talk about the boss I've been working on for a while now!

THE EYE



The original idea of this boss started when I wanted to make a boss that used these giant fists to try and crush you. The idea was that players would have to use these fists as platforms to get near the boss and hurt it since it was unreachable. After I made a prototype of that, I figured there were many many problems with the design of the room and the things the boss did. So I started to iterate over the fight.

At some point during the iterations, I came up with the amazing idea of having the final moment of the fight be a beam fight. I hadn't even thought of the beams up to this point, and this is actually the inception of that mechanic. And so, I implemented the beam so that the players and the boss could use it to fight eachother. But then the problem came of "how do I make it so that the end of the fight plays out like that?" and so I started working on various different designs for the fight. I actually would like to take some pictures of my sketch book where I drew some of the different ideas I had, but my phone's camera is too crappy for that

The design of both the fight and the boss are far from done, but I think they are finally coming together. I'm still figuring out what the fists and the eye should look like, so everything you see is subject to change, but it is enough to give you an idea of whats on the screen and whats going on, which is you know... cool.

Later I will talk more specifically about each of the phases of the fight because I believe each is worth their own post.

[Canotico]

I had to implement a new version of the script I was using to make the camera follow the players movements. This was mostly because the previous script I was using was.... kinda all over the place.

I decided to implement a new version of it that was centered in following an unknown number of "Points of Interest". The idea is that the camera will track a list of Points of Interest and then average their positions to determine the center, where the camera should be. I made it so that it is possible to add or remove Points of Interest on the fly so that the Camera can dynamically addapt.



In addition to this, I needed to add support to zooming in or out, mostly because when fighting bosses, I will most of the time want to set a different zoom for the camera depending on the situation. So in addition to having the camera be centered at the average position of all the Points of Interest, I also calculate the Points of Interest's Bounding Box (POIBB), which is basically the box that contains all of the Points of Interest (this box is in screen-space and not in world-space).



The yellow box represents the POIBB and the area between the cyan lines represents the "Freedom Area".

The Camera has a maximum and minimum zoom value it can take (which can also be changed at any point in the game). Whenever the POIBB's height or width is outside the Freedom Area, the camera will zoom out if possible to try and put the POIBB inside the Freedom Area. Likewise, whenever the POIBB's height AND width are smaller than the Freedom Area, the Camera will zoom in if possible until the POIBB goes inside the Freedom Area.

This system makes sure that all of the Points of Interest are visible, as long as the zoom range allows it.



Additionally I started messing with different "Camera Modes"



What these modes basically do is force the camera to be centered on the corresponding point of the POIBB. The default Camera Mode is the center, and these are just additions for whenever I need to force the camera position to have an offset.

There's another mode I'm working on which is a Smart mode. What it tries to do is pick from all the other camera modes (Center, North, East, South and West) which one accomodates the POIBB better in the frame. But its still a WIP since this is obviously more difficult because there are may things I have to take into account.