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[Terrorbuns]

Guess having a place to keep track of my progress easily would benefit me a little I think so here we go.

A Grand Show is a cute platformer being made solely by me, where the main mechanic is grabbing things and throwing/using them. I'd say it's fairly similar to Kirby in that sense. Here's some gifs to maybe better explain?



Here's about when I implemented the HUD/Time mechanic so the earliest showing of non-throw mechanics. The idea is that instead of having some sort of health bar, getting hit takes time out of the timer. It's not a large chunk but it adds up if you keep getting hit repeatedly.



After watching/playing too much Kirby I took the tileset look in a different direction modeled more after Kirby's Adventure and also started coding the grab-able items to actually work as they're supposed to. Note: I added screenshake and made the explosion look bigger after making this gif so it's not present here.



The drill! This is one of the few items that isn't tossed when it's used. You charge it up then go spinning in a direction! The original iteration of A Grand Show used spinning as it's main mechanic so this is more of a homage to that. Also it's fun.




I had to rework some moving platform code to get these to work in a way I was happy with but by gods I'm glad it works as well as it does because it sure does feel hacky!!!!



Current {as of July 21st 2016} look of the game! The enemies might be touched up a bit more but they're functional and working as well as I'd hoped so they're good.


Mentioned above, this particular project has gone thru not one, but two different iterations to reach where it is now, and this current iteration is very different from those two. You can play a short demo of the second one here: https://terrorbuns.itch.io/a-grand-show-demo

"Why not keep the spinning mechanics???" To be honest, I wasn't feeling them for this character design and I wanted to make a game with grabbing and throwing stuff for a while now so I decided to just go hard and now I'm here. I will say that the spinning and going fast was fun, but I'll design a better suited character for that if I go at it again.


Anyways that's it, I'll be using this devlog to track my own progress and hopefully motivate myself to work more??? We'll see.

Enjoy!

[Cakeprediction]

looks pretty c:

[Schoq]

Looks fun! keeping my eyes on this

[Zorg]

Following!  o

[jctwood]

Wow looks very cool! What are you creating the game in?

[Terrorbuns]

Wow looks very cool! What are you creating the game in?

Game Maker Studio!

[gimymblert]

sub dub

[ProgramGamer]

sub dub

zug zug

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[Schoq]

Your backgrounds jitter a bit when you stop moving btw

[Terrorbuns]

After doing some thinking I've decided to change my approach to the game's level design and opting for something similar to Super Mario 64's set-up. Basically changing to some sort of Collectathon. Which is basically a Metroidvania but let's not get too tied up here.

Instead enjoy these two gifs of me adding stuff to better suit this new approach:



wall jumps/slide and a charged jump! I mostly put them in so the player has more movement options. Might add more? But I'm limited on buttons so maybe not. Depends on what I come up with that isn't tied to an item already.



A real simple NPC system! Basically NPCs/Signs will display text when you're near them and also greet/say goodbye when you get close/leave. You don't need to press any buttons to actually interact with NPCs, I didn't want to have players disrupt their flow to talk to an NPC to progress?

Your backgrounds jitter a bit when you stop moving btw

i'll have to look into this more, maybe I'm just not seeing it for some reason. I'll see if I can do something! 

[SolarLune]

Hey, this looks cool.

- I think the charged jump could benefit from a few frames where the character's crouched, to give it a real "oomph" that isn't there for the normal jump.

- I think the text boxes shouldn't move off the screen so that you never accidentally move away from an NPC and miss their ending dialog.

Keep it up!

[Terrorbuns]

life's hilarious and the idea of A Grand Show is over a year old now! Wild.

Anyways I'm onto what's basically the fifth iteration of this idea now {though I'm using the third's engine.}

More importantly, here are some gifs of my test level:



special bonus gif of me debugging moving platforms


Right now I'm thinking of keeping it short, about 2 stages + boss per "area" with 5 areas total, so 10 stages and 5 bosses. Stages are going to {most likely} be kept at just a single room too to keep things relatively simple. My goal is to just finish the dang thing so we'll see

[SolS]

Oh hey cool I didn't know you already had a devlog for this! *following*