Progress Update: More Moves, More Bounce

Hey all!

I'm back with another progress update. This time I'll be talking about some new moves, a helpful nurse, items, and entity behavior improvements

Play-fighting

I've got three new moves here, bringing the total 'mostly finished' to 7. I've also got one more that's halfway there, and another that's very early.

• A horizontal dash style move that gives you some more mobility

• A weak projectile move that allows you to reach far targets, but with the added effect that it pulls entities closer

• A strong sniper beam move, takes a lot of energy/mana

• A placed jump pad that bounces entities (and reduces their HP), the intent being that you can chain this with a vertical/upwards move once you're under them

I've mentioned wanting to focus on mobility for the player, but I've also started focusing on affecting entities with the above moves: one of them pull towards you, and another bounces them upwards. Most moves will probably have some type of movement effect attached to them, the usual being a slight push away. I'm hoping to encourage things like using two jump pads (ceiling, floor) to bounce entities back and forth and other silly and fun things.

We have a good amount of moves now, but there are a few more planned. A vertical/upwards move, which is in an early stage, and two more to-be-determined moves, but a black hole that traps entities mid-air would be fun and likely to be one of them. All of the moves are experimental and subject to change, but hopefully they won't be changed. I'll be experimenting with them here, but I'll also release a small test build at some point in the future so you can try it out for a bit before the full Jungle-with-play-fighting build comes out. This will help figure out if anything needs to be changed or replaced.

The ground slam mentioned last week is technically there but I've been wondering if I should make the two ground slams distinct, so I've been putting it off a bit to think about that. For example, one can be a proper ground slam that does area-of-effect when it hits the floor, while the other can be more of a downwards dash? I'll play around with these a bit more soon.

Health and items

I'm playing around with health effects that progress over time if you don't take care of them. It brings a few new idle animations and some dialogue. I'm not sure if I'll incorporate it into the gameplay loop fully, but ideally I would. If you want to get rid of the effects you can visit the new nurse NPC that I've made an idle animation for.

For potions to be easier to obtain, I've made changes to the way loot works: first, loot chests are way more common and don't just contain money anymore, and second, pickable flowers are now loot I'm experimenting with for a small potion making system. The idea being that if you're far away from a shop and you don't have a specific potion, you can craft it. The third change is that the loot system is now dynamic - it responds to the player's health by increasing health potion and flower spawn probability, and the same for other statuses too. The hope is to add a fail-safe if you're far away from a shop and need potions. A fourth change that's work-in-progress is that you can carry more than one item, and the one item slot is becoming more of a quick use item slot.

Entities

I've made the entities smarter by using more information and storing their state so they can make better decisions. I've added two internal/invisible-to-the-player bars that fill up - energy, and animation-starting probability. When energy or health decreases they change their mode to avoidance, or when the animation probability is high, it takes priority and makes them chase after you again. Energy depletes with play-fighting moves, and animation probability increases with each successful move. Currently they have the following states: idling, chasing, avoiding, defeated, and some secondary ones like flying. Bosses will likely have more.

Other

I've worked on some GUI changes, removing everything except the health/energy, current item, and effects, from the HUD. The goal here being to move all of it into a new player menu page I've started working on where you can see more detailed player information.

So... we have a few more moves left to do, and then I'll be focusing on all of these things (and more that I can't foresee/maybe forgot right now):

• Drawing and animating sprites - e.g. player crouch pose, redoing run animation, redoing the Panthrill

• Entities (improving the behavior for all of them)

• The boss (redoing the arena, adding more moves)

And then lots of tweaking to make it all work well together. Things are coming together, and I'm looking forward to doing the small test build when I can.

But that's it for this one. Since things are a bit more about experimentation I'll leave three weeks until the next update again. See you then!