UPDATE 2
Well I decided on a title. Still not sold on my title screen, but it will do for now.
Finished most of my tiles and character sprites. Still have the boss/exterminator to do. A lot of little animations still left, but those will be if I have time or post entry most likely.
I decided to do away with the "infinite wrap" style camera. I was happy with the solution to the task I gave myself, but decided it wasn't a right fit for this game. That left me with the option to change the game or ditch the camera.
Stuff listed with bullets:
- Pixels! We have an alligator instead of a box! I'm not happy with all of the enemy designs and have a few animations left to do, but I'd say a bulk of the pixels are done.
- Finished State engine for the game (menu, loading, game, pause, stage complete, gameover) Still need to finish the accompanying graphics/layouts for some of those states, but shouldn't have any major changes left here.
- Upgrade system - kind of. I decided I wanted to have upgrades that could be picked up within the stages. I decided 3 pickups were too many (coin, hearts, stars). I dropped the stars(upgrades) and decided to have the abilities tied to hp. You now start with 2 hp (or hearts). At 3 you get a higher jump, and at 4 you get a double jump. Throw back to the original Legend of Zelda and needing a certain number of hearts for the sword blast. This isn't explained in game very well at the moment, so I need to do something about that. I also only kept the high jump and double jump. I played around with a few more, but decided against them for now (ledge grab and dash). You find hearts from killing enemies or inside crates sometimes. Oh, and I added crates. And coins now serve a purpose. You receive an extra life at 100.
- Boss stage. I implemented the boss level (every 4th stage), but have not completed the boss AI's yet or the design of my exterminator. Right now the boss is using placeholder pixels and using the enemy 3 "hopper" AI. This is probably where most of my remaining time will be spent.
- Made some tweaks to the level generation but it still needs a lot of work which really requires a lot of play testing to get the right blend and feel. Not sure if I'll be able to make many more changes before the deadline. I would still like to have the pieces or modules that are used to make the stages ranked by difficulty so that the harder ones only appear it higher stages and the easier ones will start to appear less frequently. I incorporated this in my stage building logic, but right now I'm telling it to use all pieces because I don't have them "ranked" or sorted in any particular way.
- Platforming tweaks made to the feel, but not sure if it's still too fast/sensitive. Getting a mix of feedback.
- Music - coming soon!
You can try out the latest build here.
