Posting at early-early morning. Forgive typos.
Update:
Complete level 1 base. Forgive lossy-quality, had to compress in order to save size due to length.
Front-end:
Fixed-spawns for building lineup in order to trigger specific set pieces/level updaters. The crappy water tower and billboard there demonstrate this. (Sidenote, billboard: I like the idea of the antagonists being extreme body-modders since that means a bunch of silly designs like “girl with jet wings” and “breakdancer with detachable legs” in some setting where that’s just a thing people can do, with the main character being a natural anomaly that’s under bounty from people who want to dissect him. Doesn’t need to be deep, this is arcade-style play. The billboard is just a crappy little logo for the company that placed the bounty.)
Prior milestones hit: Arrow with player-kill indicator when they go offscreen for too long. “Glint” effect when hit by enemy and when thrown enemy hits. Wingfist sprites.
Run speed fixed to match level by default.
Neroma’s throwable (I’m going to stop calling them ‘corpses’ since it implies that you’re killing all of these people in-story, and I don’t call them that in-code anyway) now triggers the level-end functionality when it despawns (allowing the player to do things like just let her fall, throw her into a goon for a little extra points, etc). Resets the player’s position and freezes them in place relative to the screen, but since I don’t have a level-end screen proper it just boots them to the menu immediately with nothing else. Throwable is colored differently just to match closer to some concept art I’m starting to settle on (going with “of course the boss of the mall ninjas is a plump emo girl.” Chubby girls are fun. Bite me.)
Backend Updates:
Timers overhauled. Managing them for smaller classes is now a bit more annoying, but now I don’t have to type the instantiation of 800 different variables on each startup.
Animator set up for first wingfist with some stand-in sprites. Default wing size is too large for my liking, but might keep it if it means clearer communication to the player about their status.
Credits are added along with score and “score banking” (see below), but this isn’t relayed to the player yet.
Boss flag tied to health class; triggers level-end as described above when a boss is defeated. A boss, not a designated boss. More of a note-to-self thing for later.
A bunch of other misc backend tracking to make the next parts easier.
To-Do:
Boss i-frames/“pierce”: Right now the boss doesn’t stagger when hit. Besides making attacking weird, this means that the player can just whale on them as shown in the gif by punching them. Change this to give them a temporary defense buff, but said buff can be pierced by attacks with a designated “pierce” value set (throwing enemies should have this set to 1, punches 0).
UI: Main goal of next update.
-[s]Player score should be visible on the left-hand side of screen. Credits should either be shown by this score, or below health.[/s] Done, although the 20000 reset isn’t conveyed to the player. Consider revising this.
-[s]Optional combo-helper (logs current move inputs to demonstrate how to input them) on left side of screen. Beside this in the options should be an ability to modify combo input window (more: more forgiving combo inputs, but more time until execution. less: stricter time limits, but snappier moves)[/s] Mostly done. The ability to make it optional hasn’t been added since this means overhauling the options screen. In terms of the delay change and combo logging, though, this works.
-[s]Progress-to-boss should be shown on the right. After ‘boost flight’ is unlocked, percentage should be shown of how far the player’s flown (can worry about this part later, just account for space).[/s] Boost percentage isn’t implemented yet. Will probably save that for the update for boost flight.
-Boss health bar: did not get around to this since it seemed more fitting to group here with the rest of the stuff.
-[s]Consider redoing health bar position.[/s] It’s not any worse than any of the other HUD clutter. This is kind of a pain that’s going to need fixed in a polish update.
[s]GUI anchoring to allow for resizing: Putting this at its own item since it’s going to be the biggest backend problem, since the borders on the screen actually serve a purpose for tracking level objects, but the UI should still utilize them.[/s] Not doing this. After thinking over what I want to do for art, I want to try to lift a page from how the Genesis renders sprites in terms of art direction, and tweak it a bit so it’s not just another “retro but not really” game. To this end, I think having a fixed resolution is for the best, although I’m NOT happy with what it’s currently set to.
End of level screen and transition: Tally and bank score, credits addition feedback, give option to buy checkpoint, then transition level. All the while the level “freezes.” Credits, banked-score, and checkpoint progress should all transfer between scenes. (Sidenote, “Banking credits:” Whenever a player gets 10,000 points at this level, they’ve given another credit. At the end of a level, any remainder points are added to the bank. Then the game converts every 10000 banked points into another credit, and the new remainder becomes the balance. In addition to this, the player should start their next level with a score equal to their new balance. This balance resets after a player quits.)
Endgoal: UI feedback and level end screen. Go from “functional level” to “fundamental scene template.”
EDIT: It might seem like I’m putting a lot of crap off until later, and that’s because I am. I do NOT want to spend that much more time on level 1 playing around with cosmetics instead of getting the rest of the game actually MADE!