@Tattomoosa - I just checked out your dev blog and it's really cool! You've got to put that up paid so I can do my next game in 2.5d
Saying that, I've not used Unity in about oooh 3 years, so I might be a little rusty...
I feel like centered text usually looks better until you actually try to read it.
Probably doesn't need to be tiny, and looking closer now I think my main issue with that font is it's uneven thickness -- look at the 'k' or the 'o' -- and the kerning between 'ev' in 'everything' and 'y' letters.
It may look more natural in a wider textbox, too - see Owlboy:
Which is of course at a higher resolution, but it flows more smoothly with less line breaks. You might try making the box itself a bit wider. Or maybe using colors with a bit less contrast like Owlboy, although I like the NES throwback vibe of the white on black with a white border.
So maybe I'm just picky about fonts, but the font is a big part of your game's voice.
The font is just one of the system fonts, I'm not even sure which one. I was originally using Calibri at 8pt and that looked baaaaaaad, so I just went for the first one that felt right. You're 100% about it being the voice of the game though and I'd not really thought of that.
I think wider will work too. I think I was trying to get kind of a comic book vibe, hence the roundness, but I think with the lack of pixel real estate it's not really viable. That's also why I'd kept the speech bubbles relatively simple in appearance.
Thanks for the feedback on that. "Fix the speech bubbles" is something I've kept moving down the Trello board because it seemed kind of trivial? But I think that was just because I'd not taken the time to think about how it impacts the experience of the game.
As a quick aside, because I'm using GameMaker it wasn't really feasible to turn the text white one by one (or from transparent). So, I just wrote a script that takes a string and adds in the line breaks. All it's doing is checking at each space if the string up to that point takes up more pixels than the width that you've specified, then it creates a new line and repeats the check. Then it just returns the separate lines concatenated with the space at the end of each line replaced with a # (which is GameMaker's line break).
I tried to find a script on the GameMaker marketplace that added line breaks, but couldn't find anything and couldn't find anything in the forum. I'm not the best searcher though. Thought I might put it up there for free? What would I even call it though? It's not really a dialogue system...
Anyway!
This sounds good. I only mentioned it since it seems like the other movement forms are fast and momentum based and look really fun, whereas Medusa is a bit slower. Have you considered making the medusa form more of an ability usable from any form? So she transforms, uses the AoE, and transforms back immediately to whatever you were before?
Not sure if that makes sense with your input setup, but it seems like you're only using the form to use the ability in the gif, and not to jump around.
Sort of yeah. I mean, I considered it, but I want to keep how you use the forms as consistent as possible. I was considering adding sword powers, so that you could have specific effects at your fingertips, but decided against it as it's a whole new feature and I'm already 2 years behind schedule
At the moment you transform to Medusa (time pauses while you select forms, it's a wheel select), freeze the enemies, then you're free to change into any other form and do what you want (fly and land on them to climb off the top of the screen or whatever).
I like the idea of changing back automatically, but it's inconsistent with how you use other controls so might be confusing in the heat of the moment. I might see how it plays if I implement a quick change button - you press it and immediately switch to the previous form? A bit like alt-tabbing between your forms haha
This is cool. So there's an incentive to kill as little as possible? Can you do a 'Pacifist Run'? Are there any reasons you want to make an area collapse? Does the area come back after it collapses?
It's more of an auto balancing thing. If you're being super murderous but dying a lot too and spending ages in an area, it's less likely. I don't want to punish people for taking the violent option, that's what the cult (these are the blokes who resurrected you in the first place) is telling you to do.
There is totally a pacifist option, but you can't just walk from beginning to end and avoid all the fighting. You've got to engage with the story and work out what it's telling you. I thought about all the gameplay conventions I'm using (like, you die but you can keep playing, it hurts when enemies even just touch you etc) and then thought about how those things could actually fit into the lore of the world.
That's the space where I've hidden the main secrets, as in the secrets that offer divergent routes through the game or unlock hidden things (I've hidden co-op mode, but I've talked about that a lot so hopefully people will actually look for it). There's a couple of pacifist ways around the 1st boss for example, and one of those is by understanding that Mable
was dead and certain things happened because of that, so what happens when she dies now?
Haha this sound like madness when I try and explain it without explaining it
There's a boss about half way through the main path, in the chapel, who gives you a number of MASSIVE hints in case you've missed it up to that point.
There are set places that collapse after certain plot events and they basically become inaccessible. They're usually after one of the more non-linear areas, so I can cut it off and say 'you can stop worry about getting lost for a bit now'. It's a nice change in pressure too, going from explorey to "oh craaaaaap I've got to move FAST!"
I've not 100% decided on whether to just have you die if you fall off screen when the collapse events happen, or whether to have any levels that don't have death at the bottom already (like lava or water) let you fall to another area. I think I'll most likely bring in the latter, as it's more ways to add secrets in and give people things to discover. There might be some areas that I don't want that to happen, so I'll just have to think of something that can appear at the bottom of the screen when the collapse begins that makes it clear you're going to die if you fall.
If you read all of that, I'm sorry for rambling but I hope I covered everything!
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