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There's a discord channel if you want to join -- https://discordapp.com/invite/TV43fRn

It's very WIP right now.  

I'm playing as the guy in red fighting against the purple guy.  There are two ways to damage your opponent

1)  Melee.  When two players collide, a melee collision occurs.  The winner is whoever was moving faster in their opponents direction.  The loser gets damaged and knocked back.  It's hard to tell when this happens in the video and who wins the melee clash because it still needs graphics for it.
2)  Energy Attacks.  These are only half-implemented at the moment

There's a red circle around me which indicates how much energy I have.  The larger the circle the more energy.  When the circle is red energy is being drained, when it's green energy is being gained.  You use energy from moving, teleporting, and charging energy attacks.  You start to regain energy after a brief moment of not using energy.  If you run out of energy, you have to wait a second before it starts to recharge.  

The idea is that you want to outmaneuver your opponent to score a hit.  

I'm working on a meta-game surrounding this giving you something to fight over.  The idea is that what you're looking at would be an individual level, which would be considered an entire world.  You'd have to kill everyone on the world (roughly 4 enemies per world) in order for it to be conquered.  I'm working on a very simple mount-and-blade like galaxy view where various factions are fighting over the planets.

[Original Post]
I've been playing around with the idea of creating a (very simple) 2D action game inspired by dbz.  I've got three small prototypes that I've built to that end

• An energy ball effect
• Malleable terrain (I'm thinking this would occur upon the player impacting the ground at a high speed
• Mockup of player / energy ball flight physics

I'm not sure how much further i'm going to go with this, but I figured there's no harm in throwing what I have so far out there.

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I still am thinking about this idea and how to wrap all of these concepts up into one package.  I spent Saturday night creating another prototype, this time a particle engine. 

Brief disclaimer -- I had to record this one on my phone.  I had some glitches when I tried recording on my PC.

[Joseph]

Ooooh, particles!

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Here's a video in which I control a very tiny and nimble square. It can fly / teleport and (not implemented but eventually) shoot energy beams / energy balls / lazers.

I'm the yellow dude. The circle around me is how much energy I have. Flying and teleporting drains energy. Energy automatically regenerates after not using any for a short period of time. Energy regenerates 3 times faster if you're completely stationary.

If you fly into the opponent square, a melee collision happens, and the loser gets damaged and knocked back. The winner is determined by whoever was moving faster in the opponents direction. It's all about momentum.





On the list of things I've done since recording this video
-  Added a somewhat reasonable camera instead of the stationary one shown in the video
-  Improved AI's use of teleports so as to not unproductively zig-zag around

 On the list of things I think would be cool to do
- Improved collision detection / melee resolution. It's a bit janky in the video, but I know what I should do to improve this.
- Add malleable / destructable terrain (basically integrate the code from the second part of the video in the first post)
- Add energy attacks
- Make it look pretty

On the more unreasonable end of things I'd like to do
- World generation. Instead of the level taking place on a flat surface like in the video, it'd be cool if it took place on a rather large circular world populated with enemies. Gravity would point towards the center of this circle.
- Add rpg elements, where your character can level up to learn new attacks / gain more energy / speed.
- Add rogue-lite elements, so that when your character dies, you start over with a new character on a newly generated world.

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Finally got around to implementing deformable terrain for this.  I'm honestly amazed that it works as well as it does. 





The video would be longer but I ran out of disk space while recording.  Also, the long black screen in the beginning is OBS, for some reason it takes a while to start capturing frames when I switch to fullscreen.

Anyway, for a repeat explanation on what it is, it's loosely based on the combat in DBZ. You control a very tiny and fast square. It can fly / teleport and shoot energy attacks.

I'm the yellow dude in this video. The circle around me is how much energy I have. Flying, teleporting, and energy attacks drain energy. Energy automatically regenerates after not using any for a short period of time. Energy regenerates 2 times faster if you're (more or less) stationary.

If you fly into the opponent square, a melee collision happens, and the loser gets damaged and knocked back. The winner is determined by whoever was moving faster in the opponents direction. It's all about momentum.

If anyone has any ideas on a name for this thing, I'm all ears.

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Another video

[SparseGameDev]

Cool stuff! It's interesting how the terrain deformation almost seems almost liquid or soft. I think it's just because it happens gradually rather than all at once on impact, but it's an effect I don't think I've seen before.

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Thanks!  Yeah, you're right about it being almost like a liquid.  It's a technique used in a lot of 2D games for water, I just tweaked it a bit to try and make it behave as a solid.  Still needs some work as it's probably still too liquidy, but I kind of like it.  

Having it instantly deform rather than gradually is an interesting idea, I think I'll try that out for higher impact speeds.  

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I'm playing around with what to do for the background. This geometry wars style grid is one of the experiments. I don't know if I'm going to keep it in as it makes it pretty hard to read the screen

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It looks like I accidentally made a lighting system

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I replaced the rectangles representing the player with an active ragdoll.  This is a super early first pass, and honesly just about everything in this video needs multiple additional passes.  For the ragdolls specifically, right now they're ingame and reacting to the flight physics of the player.  They also orient themselves to the terrain if they detect they're going to collide soon. 

I need to animate them for charging energy attacks, melee (winning and losing), landing on the ground, and some flailing for when they're being knocked back.  I've been reading and playing around with forward and inverse kinematics, I'm thinking I should be able to come up with something decent.  It helps that the characters are super small and move very quickly, so you're less likely to notice imperfections. 

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I made a main menu, though once again the compression on the video doesn't do it any favors





You have to be in 1080p and fullscreen to notice it but there's a particle system simulation going on in the background that you can subtly interact with.

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Added an initial batch of sounds and upgraded some of the graphics.  Also working on a very simple meta-game surrounding the fights, which is a view of the galaxy offering you planets to fight over. 

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Right now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for some of the required Steam marketing images.  There's a gallery below of possible header images to use for steam (it's that small image which appears to the right of the videos / screenshots). I guess my question is do any of these work or could they work with some tweaking, or should I do something else for this? I should add that if i decide to use one of those images i'd actually go through the effort of centering or aligning the text better

https://imgur.com/a/n6orpYa