Progress Report 4/8/2022

It's Spriiiing! Unless you live where I am, then it's Sumter -- 50% bitter cold, 50% blistering heat! :,D  Here's what I got done this week:

• Published 3D Modeling with Miles Mouse (Part 11) 
• Began planning out the details of Run From Me's new direction
• Began prototyping the movement for the playable heroes

I've been putting a lot of thought into just how these heroes are going to work. Right now, I intend for each of them to have one or two abilities and one movement "quirk". I'm still not sure how many heroes will be playable at once, but one thing is for sure: I need to be careful not to make things too complicated. This is something that can get very overwhelming very quickly.

As far as abilities go, brainstorming has gone relatively well. Here are some of my ability ideas for the heroes:

Passive:

• Protect a hero in danger
• NPCs within a certain distance run towards the hero
• Resurrect dead heroes (long cooldown)
• Give all heroes one stomp defense on start

Active:

• Stop the giantess in her tracks for a short time
• Speed up all heroes; might backfire and speed up giantess
• Let all heroes temporarily float over obstacles
• Teleport all other heroes to this hero
• Shoot NPCs with magic/grapple to save them
• Turn heroes “invisible”; might backfire and turn giantess invisible

These effects will go away immediately if the hero using them is killed. Ideally, every hero ability will be passive, allowing the player to focus on navigating the play area without thinking about ten abilities on different cooldowns. I'm keeping the active abilities on record just because I really like how some of them sound. A few active abilities across all the heroes shouldn't be too hard to manage.

Next up are my movement quirk ideas so far:

• Slow top speed, fast acceleration
• Slow acceleration, average top speed
• Fast but slippery
• Randomly wanders off
• Reverse controls

These are what we'll be focusing on today since movement is the mechanic that needs to feel as good as possible, thus it makes sense to start with it. Plus it's hard to visualize what movement mechanics will look and feel like without testing them.

So without further ado, here is the result of making five characters embodying each of the above movement quirks (plus one without any):

It was absolute chaos.

The first thing you'll notice is Johnny Rocket shooting across the screen in the opposite direction as everyone else. This is the guy I gave "reverse controls" to. The reason he's so fast is because I gave him negative acceleration and deceleration. Negative acceleration is fine and all, but negative deceleration? That basically means you speed up until the end of time.

As for the other heroes... Well, two of them got stomped right off the bat, and everything else was happening so quickly that I barely had time to process who was even whom (except for Speedy McQuick). Like I said, things can get overwhelming VERY quickly!

The things I learned from this test were that I would need to slow down gameplay quite a bit to accommodate the extra characters to manage, the view should be zoomed out enough that the entire playable area is always visible, and the height of the walking should be lowered to offer a bit more wiggle room for the extra heroes.

It was at this point that I realized that this basically meant I was taking one big step backwards; we would be going back to the gameplay version where the view was more zoomed out and the feet only reached halfway up the screen.

This time, however, we have a new goal associated with it -- something that still keeps the giantess as a core part of the game rather than a background element: NPCs. You are heroes, after all. You've got to save them. But why, I hear you ask?

Two words: morality meter. You save an NPC, the morality meter goes up towards the light side. Giantess crushes an NPC, morality meter goes down towards the dark side. Once the morality meter goes all the way up or down, you get an ending -- either good or bad, depending which way it fills.

Who knows? Maybe you want the bad ending. We'll have at least one "hero" for that, as well. :)

Back to movement: I had to let that last test simmer for a couple of days as I was feeling like I was making backwards progress. I'm glad I did wait, though. It gave me just enough time for an epiphany!

What if we have a leader hero that you control with keyboard movement, and the rest of the heroes follow points around the hero! That way, they're always close by, but they can still lag behind or shoot ahead to make things interesting!

So I put that to the test.

I also disabled the giantess and the obstacles to make things much easier to follow.

Also also, I adjusted Lightning McQueen so he's strictly a reversed direction without the infinite speed.

Needless to say, this felt a LOT better to play! Except for Captain Opposite, who I'm giving a different movement quirk. Opposite movement just won't work here. ^^;  There will need to be lots of number tweaking to make sure there's a challenge to managing the heroes without being outright unfair, but that will come in time especially as we add features.

Another possibility to the movement quirks is to have heroes break off from the group, distracted by a weakness of theirs. For example, a gluttonous hero would see a food stand and head straight for it. You'd have to click on them (maybe multiple times) to snap them out of it and get them back into the group formation.

The only problem with this idea is if I stray away from the village into something like a swamp or a volcanic area. You're probably not gonna see food shops in those areas. Who knows, though; context could be improvised here and there.

So, to summarize:

• NPCs and their fates are going to be a strong focus of the game
• Movement mechanics are hard
• Group formation seems to be the best option for movement right now
• Breaking group formation may be a viable challenge
• We may be reverting to the more zoomed out version of the game
• Taco Bell is delicious

On that note, I'm gonna break me off a piece of that last bullet point. In the meantime, let me know what you guys think so far! I'll see you guys again next week!