I really hate these hills. They force you to constantly bunny-hop...
Aeon Felis
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I'll have to admit - I don't really grasp what this plugin is useful for. I can imagine why one would want to track the path the player (or some NPC?) took, but what I don't get is:
- Why would you want that path representation to be a homology? I understand representations that don't care if that the player went somewhere if they came back to a place they were before, and I understand representations that care about places the player has been even if they came back, but I can't imagine how it'd be useful to represent that the player has been somewhere and came back IFF they took a different route when coming back.
- Wouldn't most path representation care more about areas than about points? That is - want to represent that the player has been in room A, then in room B, then in room C, and not that the player has circled point B twice and then circled point A in the other direction.
Of course, maybe I'm just biased because I didn't like Algebraic Topology when I took that class so many years ago...
In a more practical note - is a String really the best way to represent the path? Wouldn't it make more sense to provide an iterator over the points, and use a custom struct that will also tell you the orientation the entity circled around each point?
I understand that this is a jam and we should be expecting prototype-level projects, but there were still a few things that bothered me:
- The ball in the orbit's focal point. It's called (in the code) DebugCube. It's actually a sphere. It cannot be turned off.
- No way to make it orbit around an entity - which I believe is one of the main use cases of orbit cameras in games.
- No way to turn any of the keyboard controls off. At most I can set them to some (hopefully) unused KeyCode.
- Zoom is only controllable by the mouse - and active even with MouseControle::Disabled (although it is technically possible to "disable" it by setting min_zoom and max_zoom to the same number)
- No elevation control.
Similar suggestion from 5 years ago: https://itch.io/t/176920/category-opt-out-feature-for-game-jams
Premade third party assets are a controversial topic in game jams.
On the one hand, some teams (and individuals) don't have artists/composers that can dedicate themselves to the assets. Third party assets allow them to participate without sacrificing precious time on low quality art.
On the other hand, games are not judged on gameplay alone - visuals and sound are also important factors. It is not fair that artists and composers that labored on the assets during the jam's limited time have to compete with asset packages that made by non-participants who had much more time and leisure to work on them.
The suggested compromise is to allow these games to opt out of judgement criteria that they didn't make themselves. A jam's rules would specify that you can use third party assets, but you'll have to mark it when you submit your game to the jam so that during the ranking period, the relevant category for your game will be grayed out. That way teams without artists/composers could still participate, without having their third party visuals and audio compete with the visuals and audio of other games that were made by actual team members.
This, of course, requires support from the platform that host the jam - hence a feature request.
I'm sorry, but the controls are ruining the game. Mouse does not work for platformers, and make it annoying (not hard though, since the pace is slow enough) to control the jump horizontally. Also, jumping seems a bit broken, and I was often finding myself randomly floating in the same altitude after a jump.
I use Pixelorama, which is a pixel art editor, but I use tools like lines and circles and bucket fills rather editing individual pixels. Also, some of my sprites are 128x128 or even larger - while for pixel art 32x32 counts as "high resolution".
Does it still count as "pixel art", for the purpose of this jam, or should I remake my sprites?
I've never hosted a jam so I wouldn't know, but I looked at the help page and the one setting that seems like a pitfall is the ranking criteria, because it seems like if you don't set any it would not be possible to vote. Did you set the criteria?
I hear you about the level reset button. I see that many games add one, so it's probably a good idea for puzzle platformers (or puzzle games in general)
As for the not-visible-enough block - maybe I could solve this with a smarter camera controller? One that knows to focus on such entities (I'd have to mark it as a point of interest for the camera, of course) when the player is close enough to them?
Yup - that's the same bug I've encountered. I did not have time to properly solve it during the jam, so I tried to just put the platform a little farther away so that you won't be able to trigger it, but apparently you still can.
I've opened a ticket for myself: https://github.com/idanarye/bevy-tnua/issues/14
Thanks!
just_pressed is a problem for variable length jumps, but I should definitely fix Tnua to avoid repeat-jumping when you land and the button is still pressed.
As for the "stuck between two colliders" thing - this may be a bug in Tnua. I've already noticed one bug when you can do an unintentional wall-jump - is this the same thing, or did you discover a different bug?