Fire, Water, Gravity - What's Up Wednesday #5

What's up everybody?

WIZARD LAWS Are Made to Be Broken is out and playable in your browser! It's a puzzle platformer with some Baba Is You and Wario Land 2 vibes.

Though I stuck to the typical SuperTry guns and made a puzzle platformer, I did try some new things in WIZARD LAWS.

Fire

Usually when I do a fire effect in my games, I either make it super abstract or I use particle effects but neither of those really worked for what I was going for in WIZARD LAWS.

I've been pretty happy with my explosion animations across my games so I decided to give fire a try in a similar style. Though the result I have in WIZARD LAWS is not amazing, mind blowing animation, it's an alright first try!

I think I figured out how to sell the fire animation well by keeping it in motion, obscuring, rotating, squashing, and stretching it. On it's own the animation looks a little stiff but squishing it around in the code gave it a better feeling of fluidity.

In the future I'm going to try to do more effects animation like this. Maybe I can even give my explosion animations a little more pop this way too!

Water

Water and buoyancy was a huge headache in my first game, Project Maiden, so I've mostly come up with ways to get around working with it in my platformers ever since.

For some reason, inspiration struck in WIZARD LAWS and I figured out how to get a really rudimentary buoyancy mechanic going that worked just enough for my purposes.

If you apply buoyancy just as reverse gravity you're going to get a weird jittery interaction on the water's surface where the object shakes around as gravity fights to push it down and then passes it off to buoyancy that fights to push it up. It looks janky!

To stop the fighting I gave each physics object a point to check above its center. Starting from that point and working down, for each pixel that wasn't touching water I would slow the objects upward speed until it reached 0. That let objects float up and then come to a gentle stop once they poked out of the water a little.

Maybe this is obvious stuff! Maybe this is interesting! I have no idea! I just wanted to do some water jumpy shenanigans and this worked.

Gravity

I forget if I picked this up from a Game Maker's Toolkit video or something off of Masahiro Sakurai's YouTube channel but I messed with how gravity works in this one.

In WIZARD LAWS if your Wizard is moving up, gravity's downward acceleration is reduced by 25%. When they're falling down gravity is applied normally. This allows your Wizard to have a floaty, controllable Super Mario-style jump and a satisfying, crunchy Castlevania-style landing. It's the best of both worlds!

I'm considering trying this out in Bazooka Panic but I'm not sure how massive of a change that would be. Still, I really love how this method feels and it's a reminder to not take game mechanics so literally all the time. The feeling is what's most important.

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Have you played WIZARD LAWS Are Meant to Be Broken yet? Have you beat the diabolical final level? Let me know!

There was plenty left on the cutting room floor for this game so I'm going to continue building it out in June. I'll also try and sneak in a few improvements for the EXE version which will drop before the end of the month.

July is the Game Maker's Toolkit Jam so I'm thinking we ride this jam energy into that one. More games!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting SuperTry!

KC