Devlog No.053

Little later than usual, but been up too long and ready to call it quits on what I'm working on for the day and that means doing the devlog too!

The quickest thing to talk about is just reminding that Queenie's base sprite and portrait are done as shown in a previous post. I'll be working on her tf soon I promise.

Before talking about the melee rework, I'll talk about something I'm playing with atm. I've long since been considering changing the weapon/spell pickup system so that when you pick one up, you drop your old one. I've avoided doing this not because I had not thought of it. On the contrary, I've been aware of this sort of thing since my childhood and playing games like Super Ghouls and Ghosts. That sort of game though if you even touched a weapon you would automatically pick it up. So there was an added layer of challenge to avoid picking up a weapon you didn't want.

Originally, before any actual version of Aria's Dreamland released, touching weapon pickups automatically picked them up. Though the couple people I had test that little snippet of a preview didn't like it at all so I swapped to using a button to pick it up. However I intentionally avoided having you drop your old one since I wanted to avoid any kind of possible abuse that might occur as a result of that. Back during that time though it was possible to exploit spells by casting a high cost one, then picking up a low cost spell. So if you could just pick up a spell and put it back down then you'd be able to do that repeatedly. I don't know when you'd ever be in a situation like that, but I still worried about it.

As well, I did want to force the player to keep a new spell because I worried that they would pick up the spell, decide they didn't like it, then drop it right before a screen change into a shrine that they needed the spell for. The bubble spell, for example, is a screen before the shrine. So if I make this change, then that means I'll also have to move the spell to sit right in front of the shrine. Which uh... well why not right? How else can I make it any clearer that you can use the spell for that?

I guess I'll need to adjust a few others too then. Also the old spot it occupied will need something else in it's place so I guess I'll put in a few extra pieces of gold candy. I'd be curious about everyone's thoughts on this especially after everyone gets a chance to try it out. Is it a bad idea or a good idea? For me, I am just very used to games being punishing so I often forget that others may not really like hard stuff. Here's a little showing of it in action. (Gotta add a little sfx to pickup so the player knows they actually picked it up/dropped the old one)

The next thing to talk about is the melee rework. Due to extra complexity, this took quite a while and I'm still not even 100% happy about all the balance surrounding it and whatnot. I have to do some recoloring for the blade trail and I am still thinking I should add new sfx to it.

As I said, it's now a 3 hit combo. I also increased the damage and adjusted it. The first two hits of the combo do half the damage of the third swing. (Air swings always do half damage) The third swing now does about 25% more damage than it previously did. As well, the delay has been made uniformly 30 frames instead of 35 > 32. But with the combo system, there's a reduction in 10 frames if you q up for the next hit in a combo. So instead of 90 frames spent on the melee combo, it's 70 max and the way combo queuing works means it's consistently 70 frames unless you intentionally delay it. Previously it was 32 per swing at highest power level. So roughly 96 frames if you hit every swing perfectly timed. (It likely would take longer)

The only disadvantages to the new system are you do not get any air hover, you do not destroy armor instantly now, (a flat 1.4* multiplier is added to damage against armor) and individual swings at higher power is weaker by about 25% (Though this is negligible when you have the upgrades). The wind ring damage bonus was doubled as well.

You still destroy enemy weapons and projectiles all the same. (Though the hitbox on the blade itself will likely need to be adjusted) Also the wind blade no longer instantly does damage the moment you press the button and it waits a moment for the animation to actually reach the point where the blade is coming out to hit. I also have the slight worry about comboing being too easy and the player continues the combo without intending to and gets stuck in the attack animation. I'll address that if it feels like it's a problem.

Ah but as I was working on melee, it was honestly most difficult just getting all the booba sizes properly placed and aligned. I had to make a quick paperdoll stand in so I could examine them in action at a slow speed and verify they were right and good. That honestly took a lot of the time. Just tedious work to make sure things were how they were supposed to be. But that's just kind of how it is for this sort of thing. The booba must be placed perfectly. It is required.

You can see the paperdoll here floating in the air. The melee is still really buggy here and doesn't properly play the animation. It took quite a while to get it all sorted. The animation here is really heavily customized. In the end, it starts off very fast and later slows slightly and then again slows slightly a second time. Then, when the combo is actually over, it continues to play the rest of the animation even after. So long as you don't move or attack again of course. Here's the animation finished as well as a booba version to show why it slows down toward the end.

If you look closely, you can see an extra anim type in there. When falling and attacking while airborne, if you touch the ground, it swaps to a different sprite that is 'standing'. That way falling while attacking doesn't look strange if you touch the ground.

Lastly, I worked a little on the idle animations system, but didn't get much done. Instead have a new 'landing' animation that plays if you aren't moving horizontally at all. A straight up and down jump or landing without any speed will trigger it.

And, why not, have a really goofy bug that occurred while I was trying to get this to work.

Overall, very productive for all of it, but I could've been more productive if I hadn't gotten sick for a few days. I'm all better now. I had thought that I was getting sick again due to a cough, but it passed. I think!