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[Juskelis]

Happy Saturday!

This week I've been fiddling around with the menu screens. In particular, the lobby flow. The original flow was garbage. I'll be honest, this flow is probably garbage too, but its less stinky than before, which is good. Here's the flow so far.

We start on the main menu:


When we go into fight we go to the character select:


After all of the players choose their characters, everyone votes on a map:


Note that the white boxes will have images. Character portraits, stage portraits, etc. Surprising to no one but me, this took a while and required a lot of fiddling!


So other than that, we've been working on getting the characters in a way that feels nice. Once we're done with some of them I'll post them on here. That'll probably happen next week. While doing that, we've finally come up with an explanation of how on Earth all of this happened. Every playable character is notably supernatural in some form, similar to Metal Gear's characters. Every character believes that they are the chosen one for the new millennia. Obviously, there can only be one chosen one. They find out about each other, things go south, and here we are. "Modern Man Championship"

Speaking of which, we've been trying to find a new title. Modern Man Championship is a garbage name, we all know it. We've been throwing words at the wall to see what sticks, and we have a very very smooth wall apparently.

Some ideas (will be updated as they come in):
y2kill
H-GEO
Illuminati Cult 2k6
Chosen One 2kx
Go! Go! Chosen One
Mess!ah

If anyone has any ideas for a title, please let me know. We're dying. Help.

[Juskelis]

This week, not a whole lot has happened. We still haven't really decided on a title, which is expected. Programming didn't really happen much this week either, mainly because life got in the way and I didn't want to burn myself out. I ended up taking off of work for a day to help settle down. Next week things should be a little more productive. Fingers crossed.

Thankfully, I don't work alone, and everyone else has been working on stuff. Let's talk characters.

As I mentioned last week, every character believes that they are the ~*chosen one*~, but why? Well, they all have mythical powers, ranging from being able to do anime ninja moves to being literally a giant sentient penguin with a taste for blood to simply being crazy. Honestly most of them crazy. Actually, all of them are.

Here's the first four characters we've made. Artwork is done by Amy Sterling (https://www.amyjsterling.com/), and is all a WIP.

A good case of crazy is our "main" (default) character: xXdarkblade420Xx. Yes, that is his real name. Yes, he legally changed it.

Aside from having a dumb name, darkblade is really really into Japanese culture. So much so that, to the amazement of everyone, he learned to do that ninja dash from that anime. "It can't be done" they said, "thats just a stupid cartoon" they said. Well, he's the main character so obviously he can do whatever he wants; he's the chosen one!

Mechanically, darkblade is the character that is playable in the demo. In other words, darkblade is the starter character
Weapon: comic con sword
Movement Special: Dash
Weapon Special: Throw Sword



Next up we have Hitomi Ryuzaki, who is really really not into darkblade.

Hitomi is the only other person who can do the secret dash. While darkblade is some schmuck with a sword, Hitomi is the real deal. Discipline, dedication, and deadly precision are Hitomi's M.O. Training for what seems like centuries, Hitomi has perfected the art of the real blade, and has unlocked the secrets of truly free movement. Why would the universe choose anyone else?

Mechanically, Hitomi is the same darkblade, but better.
Weapon: an actual sword
Movement Special: Dash
Weapon Special: Throw Sword



Sharon Woods is a drunk wine mom. No wait hear me out!

So obviously wine is the nectar of the gods, so drinking a lot of it means you're a god, right? Well, no, unless you practice the art of the drunken master. Sharon does. She loves a good Merlot to kick ass with. You know that scene in Drunken Master where Jackie Chan is kicking ass with a cheap bottle of wine? Put that in a spotless kitchen and you have Sharon. The original inspiration for Sharon was this comic/image: https://imgur.com/k67GT Here's the first pass:

Mechanically, Sharon is meant to move in quickly and deal lots of quick, small attacks.
Weapon: limbs? Fists? Feet? All of it?
Movement Special: Roll
Weapon Special: Throw wine bottle that stuns anyone hit



Then there's murder penguin.

Honestly, not a whole lot to say here. Murder penguin is, well, a murderous penguin. Somehow this penguin became massive, and learned how to use a knife. Who taught them how to use a knife? Who gave them a knife? Why do they want to kill people so bad? Who knows.

Mechanically, Murder Penguin is annoying. Come in, attack, run away.
Weapon: Knife. Unknown origin.
Movement Special: Slide around on their belly (because obviously)
Weapon Special: Grappling Hook (again, how did this penguin get these things)



There are a couple other characters in the works, but they haven't been refined as much as this bunch of chosen ones. We're aiming for a total of six characters, so two more.

In other news, the lizard has been working on recreating the original demo's levels, just so that we know everything is working fine. Hopefully it all works out. Hopefully.

[Juskelis]

So, this week I did two things:

• Added sound menu with mute option
• Added setup so that textures tile instead of stretch, and configured so that tiles will not be cut off at the edges

As for design stuff, the lizard has started working on adding Murder Penguin's movement special. Mechanically, the slide sends you shooting off along a surface, and will turn up walls if you run into them. You can't change your direction when you start it, but you can end it early by jumping, attacking, or flying off the edge of the surface. Like some sort of crazed penguin.

The other two characters are coming along well though. One of them we have down conceptually but have no assets for: the lounge lizard. Through various levels of conniving and cunning, they have come into the possession of way too many explosives. Being the true genius that they are, they figured the best way to get rid of those explosives is to stick them onto others. Why not, right? Let's play the most dangerous game of "who is gonna die from this literal bomb in my hand?" and see who wins.

Mechanically, the lounge lizard has a movement special of exploding a bomb at their feet, pushing everyone away from them (including themselves...?) while their attack special is to pull out a freaking bomb. If someone attacks him while he has his bomb out, he'll stick it on that person and they'll die. If not, the bomb goes off right in their hand, obviously killing them instantly.

That still leaves on more character, and some concepts. I'll update you on how those go.

[Juskelis]

Alright!

This week, I've been working on adding a much needed mechanic to attacks and specials: warmup and cooldown. At the moment, when you hit a button it immediately does whatever you tell it to do. For a lot of reasons, we didn't want it to be hardcoded like that anymore. In addition, there was no consistent way to encode timings within anything. It was not pleasant. So this week I've been adding all of that into the game, so that we can alter timings for everything without going into code. It's nice. Once this is done, I'm going to be pivoting either to more music + audio stuff, or start seriously looking at spriting and such.

The lizard has been having a pretty productive week! He started off by resizing the current levels to be similar to the demo, and also tweaking numbers in general so that they are similar to the demo. After that was done, he reworked the wall jump system so that it uses analog values for jumping logic instead of set angles. Next week, he's planning to refactor blocking so that it isn't completely and utterly broken anymore, and add in the sliding movement special.

Amy has been on vacation this week, so nothing has really happened art wise. Next week the plan is to get some really real art done on some really real characters. How exciting!

Once these things are done, we're gonna be able to add not one, but two characters into the actual game! Wow! Once we do that, the plan is to pivot into playtesting everything, and making sure it isn't stupid. It will definitely be stupid.

[Juskelis]

Another week, another update 

This week was rather piecemeal for me: I added a system to manage per-scene music nicely, and added some missing state logic to the animations. This next week, I'm going to pivot to working on movement specials and attack specials, so we can finally actually add characters.

The lizard is still working on the movement special logic for slide. Sadly, he got sick partway through so not as much work got done as we'd like, but that's okay. Once that's done, he's going to get to work on... something. Possibly levels? We'll see.

Artwork came along really nicely! We managed to solidify the new characters, and will hopefully have stuff to show to the world soon. We're all pretty happy with how everyone is turning out, and we're entering the "tweak" phase for everything.

Other news: we're starting to seriously look at the animations and how we want to represent them. We know that we're going with a classic image sequence rather than bones or anything, but we're uncertain of the actual style. One idea is to have the animations similar to Mr Game and Watch, meaning that they will be almost static images. Personally, I like the idea, simply because it means less work for our animator, and we can possibly have Amy do that. I really like working with Amy and I have yet to find an animator who lives up.

[Juskelis]

Sorry I'm late!

I got Planet Coaster recently and lost track of time

I still managed to get work done though! I added Sharon's movement special in, which was surprisingly easy to do with the new timing interface. As I was testing it though, I got fed up with some collision issues we've been facing for a while because of something dumb that we did. I fixed it though, and I'll detail it in a follow up post to this one. Next week the plan is to go back to the good stuff and really figure out these new characters.

The lizard was still sick. He gets sick once a week each year, and when he gets sick he pretty much dies. So, the lizard is back from the dead? Hopefully. I've been told that he'll work on the slide movement special still. I'm excited to see it!

Artwork was a little slow this week just because Sakura Con was happening and our artist happens to be a fucking weeb. Go figure. Next week's agenda is to get some shots done to show off.

[Juskelis]

Ok so the collision issues.

In our game, we have two scenarios that use colliders: movement and combat. Originally (in the demo) we used the same collider for both systems, and kept the collider a constant size. This works really nicely for movement, but makes combat a bit of a BS situation, because you could hit the parts of the collider that didn't have sprite on them.

In the original demo, we had all of the sprites be the size of the collider, so that when we wanted the sprite to be flush with a surface, all we had to do was draw the sprite on that side of the image itself. Nowadays, we use Sprites, which doesn't give us that luxury. The big issue was with wallriding. If we used vanilla spriting and settings, our characters would float off of the walls. This sucks.

How do we solve it? Our first pass was to resize the sprite bounds so that they reflected the true size of the sprite. Essentially, we made the sprite bounds represent the hitbox for the sprite. The stupid part is where we decided that this hitbox should also determine the movement collider's size and shape. Normally, it *kind of* worked fine; the sprites were always flush with whatever surface we wanted them to be flush with. However, since hitboxes can change all the time, even within the same animation, we got a lot of weird edge cases: hitbox would expand into the ground and "crush" the player, hitbox would switch quickly between touching and not touching the ground which makes the player jitter between inair and onground, so on.

Obviously, we needed to pull the hitbox out of the main collider. The main issue was that we needed to completely separate all of the logic involved with combat from the movement collision content. I've been trying to avoid using layers in this game because they are easy to overlook, but this required me to not only add layers (gasp) but change the collision matrix (GASP) so that weapons wouldn't interact with the movement colliders.

Once we separated the two colliders into the movement collider and hitbox, we had to get the hitbox (and sprite) to be in the correct spot. Since the movement collider is constant, we have to move around the visuals so that they are properly flush with the edges. After some frustration with the Sprite class (why is pivot in pixels, Unity? why??) we were able to get everything flushing properly.

Currently everything hitbox related is still defined within the sprite itself, including where on the movement collider it should be flush with. I'm fairly happy with how it works, but I definitely need to add some stuff to it so that we can make it more generic in the future.