next »

[Shoehead]

Hi, are the 2D Zeldas your favorite ones? Do you like Cowboys on different planets? Demons? I don't know where I'm going with this but these are all things I'm putting in this game

The Set Up

You're a young settler from one of the new Martian cities striking out into the untamed frontier. On your way, though, you're ambushed by a shadowy group and left for dead. What's worse is, they took your dog!

What actually is this?

It's a 2d Zelda-like with space western stuff in for PC (probably Itch, maybe Steam but that is a long shot).
It started with me drawing a western styled tileset and sprites based on Link's Awakening and the Capcom Zeldas in like Dec 2018, which I quickly realized I really would rather be working on than my broke ass platformer that was going nowhere. So it's about 14 months old as of this post. Things started out strong and stayed really strong for a long time, mainly because I was just taking things from random Zelda games and recreating or iterating on them. Then I got sick, then I got a dev job. But I'm goin hard on this game again. I hit MVP some time last summer and now I'm getting stuck in to content. The aim is to work towards some sort of demo to put on itch.io, maybe to raise funds for Steam depending on how it goes. One chunk of the overworld and maybe a dungeon (other than the small intro dungeon I have in atm).

Who are you?

Shoehead- Art and Code
I'm Shoehead, I do pixel art a lot and I ran out of friend's games to do art for years ago so I learned GML. I'm ok at both. Stuff tends to break in pretty amazing ways. More of that later.
Most of my dev work gets sandwiched in between body piercing and art work for @playoutworlder . I'm a busy person

Twitter
Itch

Please note I DO have some music lined up for this game. We haven't sorted it out yet but please don't get in touch with me to do music, I'm grand for the moment.

What happened to your last game?

Hoo boy. I broke the hell out of it is what happened. Some projects kind of outstay their welcome, and tbh it got bogged down in a lot of bad programming that I either couldn't fix or was too bored to.
That and my collision was miserable. Gravity was always breaking, the player was always clipping into walls. It was awful. My last proper stab at it was for Devtober 2018 and I just couldn't rescue it.

Finished features

-   Player skins and alternate palettes
-   Name entry
-   Combat
-   Health upgrades (you know... pieces of heart)
-   Save games
-   Dialog
-   Options
-   Difficulty options
-   Dungeon and overworld map UI
-   Shops
-   Water and swimming
-   Z levels
-   Whip (works like a hookshot)
-   World and dungeon maps loading from tables (hands free warping from cell to cell, its great!)
-   Dodge rolling

Planned features

-   Some small dialog choices
-   Button Rebinding
-   On screen timer
-   Iron man mode
-   Marking the map (very tentative!)
-   Even faster text scrolling
-   Separate dungeon floors

Recent changes 11/02/2020

-    Some persistence on maps (if a room has all enemies killed on it they wont respawn unless you move a few screens away first)
-    An option that changes all text to "..." if you want to skip most text. It's kind of a half measure tbh
-    Sprites were redrawn in a slightly bigger size. Roughly the difference between LA to LTTP in a jump. I hated how little detail I could get out of the GB stle sprites.
-    Lots of changes to the scale of tiles. Particularly buildings.
-    Allowed for massive overworld rooms, roughly double the size of a regular overworld room. Also logic for joining small rooms to the edges of large ones and warping properly are in.
   (eg. if you are in the lower left quarter of a larger room that borders 2 small rooma you can now walk into the right room based on your Y coordinate)
-   A nicer looking screen for character creation, naming your dog and choosing some game difficulty options.
-   Hearts are now split into half health counters giving you 32 total hp. It makes things a little bit more forgiving.
-   Reworked a lot of hitboxes/hurtboxes

Currently working on:

-    The larger player sprites are almost done, they need swimming and gun sprites to be updated
-    Mapping out the main town of Van Allen. Exterior is done for now but most of the interiors are missing tile sets and npcs
-    Shrinking a lot of hitboxes and blowing up some other.

Goals:

   1. Hit MVP DONE!
   2.   Make a demo

[Shoehead]

HALL OF SHAME
Some of the best glitches and bugs I've had so far

Carrying object but throwing them with the TNT key would transform them into lit bombs


Missing the mark:



CUT Stuff

My first attempt at a boss. I wanted to add a short little fight while you only had a shield to defend yourself. In regular Link's Awakening I'd never bother with a shield unless I was fighting the shell guys, but with the newer LA on Switch they gave the shield it's own button and suddenly I was using it all the time and I wanted to encourage trying to keep it equipped. Might still have a fight centred around blocking but not this ones



So I'm like what if you using your shield to reflect fireballs was just Alleyway\Arkanoid as a little gimmick. So I made it and realized Alleyway is a super slow game at times. So FORGET IT!


The first mockup

[Shoehead]

I managed to miss screenshot Saturday this week but enjoy me trying to hack some cutscenes in

[Shoehead]

Ok so some work from the last week or so of lunch times on this. After hard coding like 3 cutscenes I decided there had to be a better way. So I set about making this system to direct scenes easily. As you see here there's a heap of arrays sorted by step which triggers an event at the step's time value. It works stupidly well! Atm it doesn't load from an external ini like I want it do because... it refused to? I have no idea why so I just went and got the other shit working.

Right now I can do stuff like set a sprite, animation speed, movement direction, movement speed, call dialog, and shake the screen. I also have options built in to let it either loop endlessly for wandering npcs who aren't 100% part of a cutscene or to have it just end.

Also if you notice by the last few entries I'm only putting in a time entry and an action. That's because today I figured out how to populate the arrays with blank entries so they can be totally skipped over which is gonna save me a bazillion years copying and pasting.



Here's all the features in kind of action. It's not a lot but it's cool to know I've made something that I don't know the limits of at all. Current plans are to add a tag to make the npc jump, to mask the player character and control it's actions, to take control of the camera and to spawn effects

Also while I'm here I took the ai from a creature from an older game and improved... it


And also I did a load of stuff with the start menu. There's an intro coming at some point too?



I still have no real idea of what the story of this game is but I'm getting there with the features. There's like... REAL game features in now. FOR A REAL GAME

[emscape]

I love the logo and I really like the animation. I'm keen to find out how the game will unfold eventually

[cynicalsandel]

Neat. Posting to follow.

[Shoehead]

More improvements to the cutscene controller. I can mess about with the player now!