https://darkgriffin.itch.io/infinitroid
Day 1 build, yay! Not much to see yet, but laying some groundwork for later.
I'm actually quite pleased with how far I've come in just over 24 hours!
I've got some code to draw only a corner of the sprite at a time. In 64x64 res with 8 by 8 sprites, that gives each sprite 4 frames of animation. Essentially I've multiplied the amount of animated frames without actually changing the amount of sprites. The system requires I only plug in a sprite ID like normal pico-8 code. The code call then will use a variable constantly ticking 1 to 4 to get the offset "real sprite location" from a table.
There's a modified version of this pulling tiles in for rendering. Tiles can be set to any of the 4 offsets, or they can use offset 0 to have their x determine the offset. The former is demoed by the ramp tiles, the latter is shown by the varying ground tiles. (Which are actually 4 corners of a single sprite on the sheet).
I also got a basic player up and running, it's functional but not very good to play. It can also run out the sides of the frame, among a few animation issues. However, shooting and jumping are functional. Should I run out of jam time/energy, this player sprite can do in a pinch.
Still up for development, in no particular order:
- Get a basic hud display in place that will show the current upgrades, and eventually be expanded into a map and progress screen.
- Get a map generation going, so we have a room layout to view. This will be expanded upon to build the game map in layers, with difficulty data to help the game know what "area" the player is in. My hope is to eventually have a "power up flow" for the map, meaning power A needs to be found to open Area B's doors, which contains power B for area C, and so on. The areas might crisscross, but if that's too difficult to figure out, I will simply build in layers from bottom to top of map till it's filled, using the y axis to determine difficulty of the area.
- Spawn doors, implement some sort of "fake scrolling" or "level scrolling" to allow room connections. (I'm thinking for the first pass, I will be happy with static screens and a lame "take rendering, shift it, load new map" type deal. Fancy comes after function.)
- Get some prop spawning so I can place enemies/statues/doors later down the line. (This is just layered on top of the current tile roof and floor generation system)
- Spawn some enemies into the room layouts. Give them rudimentary "AI" for some basic lame retro attack patterns. Eventually the enemies will be broken into "difficulty area", so lower areas will spawn less of them, and the last, deepest area will be crowded. My hope is this creates a difficulty scale up to the final boss.
- Handle player death, respawn, and enemy drops.
- Add a seed selection screen at boot, to let users enter a "planet name". Then make the generation code reliably recreate rooms as they are revisited, so the game can be consistent for replays/speed running
- Get some sound effects in place, cause guns are lame without PEW PEW PEW.
- Get some music in place, bonus if music changes based on "map area" of the game.
- Add at least 1 "Final Boss" room with a unique boss enemy. Beating it should trigger the "Escape sequence", requiring the player to run back to the surface as fast as they can. (The time will have to be a best guess and will most likely be too generous, but I'd rather have it that way instead of making the ending too hard/impossible on some seeds.)
It would be nice to get some pallet swapping or alternate tileset use going, better player physics, and some "save points", maybe even vertical room support aka metroid's shaft system. I'm at 20% of the token compression cut off though. So I may have to drop some of these depending on how much memory enemies, map, and progress system takes up. Yay for limitations!
Lots of ground to cover, so little time. I will check back in tomorrow, hopefully with at least 1 or 2 of the above marked off. See ya!