Thank you very much, that means a lot :D! I do agree with all your points. Most of the jumping things you can do were accidental, but I got so used to it during testing I could not bring myself to prevent it, It does need a lot of tweaking together with the map though.
With the programming stuff, feel free to ask me anything, and I will do my best to answer. : )
The movement felt really good after I figured out how to exploit rolling + double jumping, it gave me that ninja feeling :)
I don't know if there's any private messaging on itch, but I'll ask some quick programming questions right here for now. First, did you seperate the world into sections for graphics rendering and/or activating enemies? I've been thinking about this myself when programming & reading about how other games do it, but wondering if it's even necessary for a 2d game considering how powerful modern computers are. I thought maybe you just have everything activated all the time after seeing how bats follow you between areas & there's no loading or transition when switching areas, except the camera panning.
The other main thing, how did you do the minimap? I was wondering if it was just rendered from the collision tilemap. It also looked like there was some kind of "fog of war" or "line of sight" used for revealing the minimap. I have never implemented a minimap, but I want to work on it soon since it's such a big deal in metroidvanias. I kind of like the idea that you can approach minimap programming like it's a sub-game where you control the pixel moving around the minimap while you control your hero in the real game. It looks like you might have used a system like that & I was curious how it worked exactly.
Thanks!
Haha, awesome :D!
Yeah, I forgot to add a way to contact me, it's MinorLegato#1011 on discord : ).
The chunks were more of a design choice to separate the biomes/background images. In the beginning, I also thought about deactivating stuff outside of the current chunks, but as you said it was not necessary for any performance reasons. there is around 800-900 active entities in the beginning and my 6-year-old dying laptop was running it alright, I might change that system in the future though. But I do cull everything outside the view of the camera before rendering.
For the minimap, I marked the tiles that have been in the line of sight of the player with a flag, and then only rendered those tiles in the minimap. but you could keep track of that in a completely different structure if you wanted to. the line of sight algorithm I used is just a line trace between the player and close-by tiles and detecting if I intersect anything.
Feel free to tell me to elaborate on anything, on here or discord! :D
