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[Spennerino]

This looks pretty cool, yeah! The player still seems slow to accelerate (in the GIFs, at least) - is that intentional?

I agree - from the gif only - the acceleration does seem a bit slow/unresponsive. But the world seems very solid, and animation looks great.

Oh, sorry! I definitely should have mentioned that both of the gifs from the previous post are from before i resolved the slowness feedback.

These 3 short gifs from the first post more accurately show how it plays currently:




Thanks,


Spencer

[PirateFish]

Nice to hear - that definitely looks more responsive. Awesome work

[Spennerino]

Nice to hear - that definitely looks more responsive. Awesome work

Thank you! I hope i found a nice balance between too fast and too slow

[SolarLune]

Yeah, that seems better. Nice job.

[Spennerino]

Update 14: Designing the GUI

To start, i just want to say that i wish i had iterated on the design here so that i could have received more feedback along the way but i think it turned out OK anyways....So ill just post about it retroactively.

I started with the concept of using playing cards to design the gui and i iterated quickly on a bunch of different ideas


I liked this second iteration a lot so i put in the effort of actually adding it to the game


Trying to decide on how many characters the player name should have as a maximum. (I'll be either 3 or 4 characters)


After receiving feedback and hating how much useless black space there was when there wasn't 4 players i messed around with a few ideas.



Iterated on the design again and trying new locations for the GUI. Juggernaut is the longest job class name, so i was playing around with including it on the GUI


Redesign trying to reduce the screen usage as much as possible


Redesigned again because i hated how little the GUI stood out from the rest of the game assets. The white borders helped a lot. I still haven't implemented the clock.


Playing around with including a score and stage name at the top but it just seems overkill with the size and how much information it provides. Score might stick around but stage name definitely wont.


The design i did recently for the mimes job card. Once i do one for the knight i can finally start animating the transition.

There isnt too much information in this post but hopefully seeing how many changes and how much thought and effort went into this is interesting to someone.

There will be a follow up post on this subjest once i finish redesigning the Join Game Menu that i am working on currently.

Thanks,


Spencer

[Wingz]

as someone who feels like designing a good GUI is somewhat of a dark art, that post is super great and ill probably end up using it as a reference at some point
thanks a lot

[Spennerino]

Yeah, that seems better. Nice job.

Thank you!

as someone who feels like designing a good GUI is somewhat of a dark art, that post is super great and ill probably end up using it as a reference at some point
thanks a lot

That's awesome thank you. I wish I could present it in more of a tutorial format but I'm glad it helps regardless. I couldn't really find any resources when making it which is part of why there are so many iterations.

[SolarLune]

Cool GUI, yeah. I'm a fan of the card designs, but the final one looks readable and useful, so it's cool, too.

[Spennerino]

Cool GUI, yeah. I'm a fan of the card designs, but the final one looks readable and useful, so it's cool, too.

Thank you!

If it was a single player game I wouldn't have to be so careful about making the ui as compact as possible and show the whole card. But because of it and not wanting to mess with zoom on my pixels players can actually get to the corners that the ui covers. Readability and compactness definitely won out, but I tried to make it unique and styled to my game anyways.

[Spennerino]

Update 15: Coins

This update is going to be focused completely on coins; What i have done with them so far, and what i still plan to add for them.

When defeating enemies they will drop a randomized amount of loot. The loot can either be a job class, healing, mana, or coins and the quantity is controlled by what enemy type it is. The type of loot is not random.

Coins have also been added to the map in static locations. I felt that this was important so that i could use them to direct a player to where i want them to go. I can use them to identify secrets or the intended path or have then in hard to get places just to make the player think about how to get there.

One unique aspect that i wanted to bring to the table was dropping a few coins when damage is received. This is pretty much a sonic coin reference but you don't drop all of the coins you are carrying, just a few. The reason for this addition is really for multiplayer...when one player is damaged another player can swoop in an steal their dropped coins for them and it adds a bit more competition to the overall cooperative game.

The reason for the coins existing at all in Mimix is so that you can spend them! There will be 2 primary purposes for them that i will add to the game soon but it is possible that this will change.

The first thing you can spend them on will be job classes. When you are on the world map there will be some sort of shop where you can spend your coins to select specific jobs to start the next level with.

The second thing you can spend them on is reviving mid level. One of the biggest feedback issues i witnessed when demoing the game was that when playing multiplayer and one of the player die early they are left completely bored with nothing to do. My plan to resolve this is to allow them to spend a small amount of coins to rejoin in the level. Recent multiplayer Mario games used a lives system to limit unlimited respawns but it is a pretty terrible and unfair system. With the lives system you start a level with an inconsistent amount of respawns based on how many you finished the previous level with and unless you collect rare 1ups or collect 100 coins you cant increase or reset the lives without dying enough times to use a continue in-between levels. There was no limit to the amount of continues either so its is overall a pretty arbitrary design.

Fast, skilled players will likely spend less time collecting coins, and slower, less skilled players will likely spend more time collecting coins so hopefully it will create a nice balance of wealth sharing for that players with more coins for the players that need it.

Thanks,



Spencer

[Spennerino]

Update 16: Crystals, Knight Job & Sprint

Sprint:

I'll start this post by talking about the sprint mechanic in Mimix. Early on in the project i added to option to move faster by double tapping a direction causing the player to sprint. You could only enable sprinting by being on the ground and when not sprinting the movement speed was pretty slow. The immediate feedback i got from this was that players wanted to spring always and there was accessibility problems getting it to actually start.

It took i long time to find the right solution and the sprint is now a automatic toggle. The base speed has been drastically increased and the sprint is a pretty minor boost but happens when heading in the same direction for a time period before it kicks in. Once it kicks in, it continues until directional input changes. To improve the system even more the sprint cant enable while walking up slope and kicks in instantly when going down slope which really adds to the level design possibilities and is really exciting to me. Air and ground maneuverability increased dramatically because of this change and it is a lot more intuitive for players learning the game.

Crystals:

I don't think i have talked about it too much yet but using crystals in my designs is going to be one of the primary themes. Crystals are pretty cliche for the rpg genre but is a bit more rare for the platformer genre so i don't mind it too much.

First, the end of the level goal will be to collect one of the world crystals. Lots of improvements and changed need to be made for the visual aspect of this but the functionally will pretty much remain the same until the end of the project.

Second, there are now Crystal formations coming out of the ground which will be part of the level design. There are 3 types...hp, mp and job class. To break them and get their contents you can either attack them with you job class, jump on them, or jump into them.

I wanted a sort of coin block mechanic for Mimix so that i could reward the player and help them out as they progress through the level and this fits the bill. The only downside to the design is that they don't make as much sense to be floating around, they have to be attached to the ground or walls in some way.

Third, i used this crystal theme to design the look of the job star the bounces around after defeating a job class enemy

Knight Job:

I've shown off the things i'm talking about around in gifs multiple times before but...I finally implemented the first job class into the game! You switch to a job class by collecting a job crystal. These can be optained by defeating a class enemy or by breaking open a job crystal formation.

The knight is the first playable job and along with it i added the first job class enemy. For this job class and likely all others there are a few ways to attack. For the knight you can either do a simple sword swing on the ground or you can do a fancy spin attack if you jump first. One thing i haven't gotten around to yet is adding a change attack for the sword to increase the attack range while also consuming additional MP.

The MP system might disappear or be reworked as i go because it doesn't really feel like its a mechanic that needs to exist right now.

And...thats it! I think i am all caught up on posting about the changes and content i added to prepare for the demo event i did now so there wont be any more posts until I get something else done.

Thanks,



Spencer

[Sora]

How about adding some smoke to the wall slide/jump?

[Spennerino]

How about adding some smoke to the wall slide/jump?

Thanks for the comment! I haven't gotten around to adding in vfx and particle effects yet, i just did the jump and impact a long time ago as a proof of concept. These are coming up pretty soon on my todo list though.

Thanks,


Spencer

[stryfe]

Met your project today and though I'm kind of a lurker I had to compliment your job. It looks awesome!

[Spennerino]

Met your project today and though I'm kind of a lurker I had to compliment your job. It looks awesome!

Thank you, Glad you were able to discover it!

[Spennerino]

Update 17: Join Game Menu

For the past couple weeks I have been hard at work on the games join game menu screen. Previously it was a simple, ugly placeholder menu where you could join the game and nothing more. My recent changes have expanded it allowing for a decent amount of player customization before starting.

The menu now always displays 4 cards to make it obvious that they should be playing multiplayer. Once they join the card flips over to the front to show that they have joined and their job class. Next the game forces them to have a unique primary color. Once joined players are then allowed to customize their 3 character long name, their primary and secondary colors. All of the color switching is done through programming with shaders rather than with sprites allowing it to be truly dynamic. The other change I implemented is having the menu settings carry over into the gameplay UI. Overall this was a surprising amount of work and most of it will probably go unnoticed so i am glad its done.

I am really happy with the progress on this screen but i still need background art and save / loading functionality for returning players before its complete. For now i think i am going to work on a completely different feature for a while to give myself a break from UI.

Thanks,


Spencer

[Spennerino]

Update 18: Off Screen Location Identifiers

Small update today! One of the obvious things that i needed to improve on, was allowing the player to see where they are roughly located when they go off screen. Before adding this new feature it was difficult for players to understand if they were still alive once they got scrolled off. The forward most player is able to force the screen forward and knock slow players out of view and once a player goes too far off view they are killed.

The UI works no matter which side of the screen you exit on..top, bottom, left or right. Later on I want to make it so that the identifier flashes before you get killed by the scrolling so that it offers a bit of distance information as well.

Thanks,


Spencer

[ferreiradaselva]

Following!