[WIP] Creeping Me Out!

[Mixel]

Fair point I could make it killable.. Or at least.. possible to persuade to leave.

Flying fish make sense lower down but we're really, really high up in the air for most of this level and they'd be kind of funny up there. (I have a level that is going to have SO many fish so fish are very well represented already..)

[Mixel]

Progress in bits here and there..

Here's the very first look of the desert stage (yes, lol.. There's a desert stage..) Currently undecided on whether I'll be going full parallax or using boring old background copper.. (Who am I kidding I'm almost certainly going to do some crazy parallax nonsense!) Only reason I jumped forward to make a bit of the desert is that I'm also making a tutorial on how to make nice copper gradients and I needed a theme that'd make sense.



Other developments - decent progress on the ship level, and probably going to finally finish the swamp tomorrow, if i can fix my bugs by then, and then take a stab at doing some more boss fights.

i have a few new bugs on trying a play through, probably from scorpion changes but some may be knock on effects from me altering some shared things in my code, so (for my use more than anything) tomorrow i need to fix mudman projectile directions, and stop mudmen from automatically occasionally exploding(!) i need to make it so ghost girls projectiles come out of the ghost girl and not the player(haha) and i need to work out why one of the bosses freezes the game up entirely. - also reduce time waiting for gas pipes to stop squirting. Oh and try to stop the bottom panel from jumping up and down between levels?

more to show very soon, including a fun surprise - hopefully!

ed: a bunch of my parallax needs minor reworking for some reason, but its all tiny things i can likely fix without issue. Eveything I strike-through I've fixed, at least!

[Pyromania]

This game is reaching the heights of Shadow of the Beast quality or better.

[Mixel]

best compliment ever! TY! I hope that’ll be the case once it’s complete.

It’s probably bigger than any of the SOTBs already, map area-wise.

[Mixel]

Here’s a look at parallax in the desert, trying something new that I thought would play well with the hazy backdrop..

[ Show youtube player ]

Now I’m working on more enemy types. The surface of the sand level is going to be slightly different to how it’s presented here, mixing the semi isometric-ness of the slime pools with the usual 2d style for hills etc. hopefully it’ll look nice!

--
[ Show youtube player ] - fixed up the semi isometric sand idea.. I think it looks good! The sand dunes are created in a really funny way, im not sure it's useful for many people's backdrops, but you can certainly make some suprisingly wide things with clouds and a lot of patience.

[Silverstreak]

Continues to look amazing @Mixel

[saimon69]

The "Disinterested Punch" weapon ^^ - Being Francis a real Chad he simply sweeps them out (or at least that is the apparent body language)

[Mixel]

hehe! He does have a look of having had enough of this shit. Anna definitely seems more into the fighting.

Thanks @silverstreak.

I'm experimenting with some graphical things now and I've just semi accidentally worked out how to do something I'd been wondering if it was possible for a while. Going to look niiiice! (but you can't see it yet, lol)

[Mixel]

[ Show youtube player ] you CAN see it now though.

Winter’s Creeping Greetings

Good tidings! ? I hope you’re all well and have a great holiday period, here’s a little look at the mountain stages.. I’ll probably be quiet on the game-making front until after new year..

I was foolishly trying to finish the snowy stage in time for Christmas - to release a demo - but it’s not going to be possible, (I should have started the process much earlier, it only occurred to me when everyone else seemed to be releasing Christmas games/demos, haha!) - BUT no reason I can’t show you some of it, as it’s pretty fun!

The technical side of what’s going on in the background here is probably more complex than anything else I’ve done yet.. first I hand animated all the snowflakes (uuugh), running the parallax clouds below them, then using the 3 reserve parallax colours and their half-bright partners in the tileset to make ice transparency and multiple copper gradients of different darkness..

The ice caves are visually the most happy I’ve been with an area. If I get the music right it should be dripping atmosphere!

A lot of the behaviour is still a bit buggy in this video, but it’s almost done now. The penguins are my favourite, and there are at least 2 more enemy types on this level for you to meet, when it’s time!

[Pyromania]

How long is it taking to develop this awesome game?

[Mixel]

That’s a mystery for me too. I’ve been working on it (to different degrees of intensity) for just over a year now, progress is accelerating fast in some ways but is complicated by the fact that I know my way around scorpion so much better so I try more ambitious stuff. Scorpion is missing a few features that I’ll need before finishing it, too.

Depending on a lot of family and health issues it’s not inconceivable I might finish making it in 2022, but I have quite a lot of real life stuff going on so fingers crossed!

[tarr]

It seems to me that this game is going to be great, but, form a seasoned gamer point of view, I have a suggestion about something I consider fundamental. So fundamental that it will determine the final result.

THE MAIN SPRITES ATATCK ANIMATION


Sorry for the caps lok, but I really feel the urge to point this out. Again, I am not a coder or a game maker myself, but I've played, loved and hated a lot of similar games of the 16 bit era, and something is quite wrong with this otherwise great game, and that is how the hero sprites attack.
Not aonly the animation frames are goofy, but the attack range seems to be very short and this would let me down a lot as a gamer, because those two aspects seems to undermine playability and fun.

This said, everything else seems great for an Amiga game. This seems to be both a potential 95% score on magazines of the old days (for graphics, design, overall concept, techincal aspects and so on) or a 65% due to lack of charisma in the main sprites and to their goofy attacks.

I hope the developer does not get me wrong: I am admired by his work, but I also fear that it could result in a very inferior result that it could achieve just for this feature.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by tarr

THE MAIN SPRITES ATATCK ANIMATION

Noted.. Not taken wrongly, and no offense taken. There's going to be a bit of this - I've had a few people disliking various parts of the visuals.. Firstly though, very little of it is 100% finished. This is one of the first times anyone's actually had crit for a gameplay mechanic, though.. So that is interesting to see.

Goofy is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you mean by that, haha. Francis isn't supposed to look cool, he's supposed to look like someone who thinks he looks cool, but is really just a huge dork.

We've only seen the beginnings of what anna can do, too. She's much better at melee; her powerups are expanded melee based, while francis' power ups use the (upgradeable) shotgun. I think you'll maybe like her attacks.

In terms of default melee range it's maybe more forgiving than it might appear? That's not feedback i got from anyone playing the demo.. It's significantly more forgiving than SOTB1 or Lionheart for example.. Do you have any games that are good examples of how you think the melee should work instead? Out of curiosity.

And thankyou for the kind words. All feedback is good feedback.

edit: thinking about it, in the xmas dev update, you can't easily see the attack graphics with the light background. i'll have to do something about that so it's visible in all conditions..

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Francis isn't supposed to look cool, he's supposed to look like someone who thinks he looks cool, but is really just a huge dork.

XD I approve.

[Mixel]

I’ve done a bunch of things lately that I can’t easily show yet.

I’ve made my occasional Parallels/MacOS/scorpion workflow much better, using my ancient MacBook Pro while away from home.. it’s super streamlined now. Just in time to go back to Windows again.. lol. though maybe not! I need to compare compile times, maybe it’ll run faster on my M1 Mac at home. Perhaps this is the sort of thing I should make video tutorials about, as some of it is quite counterintuitive initially.

Francis’ punch animation improved, 2 new frames. Having his arm/fist stick out without any pullback first looked a bit odd, now there’s more of a visible swing around. Anyone who didn’t like the old animation still won’t like this one though.

Anna’s high kick is reverted to an earlier version where it’s slightly harder to execute but much more effective. (And longer range)

Coins look much better now, I forgot to show that here.

The motorbike level has been redesigned slightly to accommodate the much stickier ramps in newer Scorpion builds, as well as removing most jumping! You can now wheelie without attacking, and attack without doing a wheelie, though you have to use wheelies to bounce up to higher platforms. It’s complicated, but much closer to how I originally imagined it working anyway.

Drawn most of Shazia’s store, one of the few hand pixelled areas in the game.

Tweaked snail and slug behaviour. Fixed frogs so they jump on ramps and everywhere else they’re supposed to be able to jump

I’ll hopefully be able to share video of new things in a few days time.

[Predseda]

As usual, when you need a tester, you know one

[Mixel]

It'll happen, it's way too buggy to even think about that at the moment though, i have quite a few things to fix.

Also since the winter level I've hit a (inevitable really, i knew it'd happen eventually!) certain scorpion/ECS memory "limit", so the only way it can run in it's full form atm is if you emulate something with >2MB chip, haha. So properly testing it on my real A1200 is only possible on a level by level basis.. One way or another that won't always be an issue eventually, but it'll be working on it more and faster in the new year. (im still not entirely home yet!) - hopefully starting to stream the development again too.

[Mixel]

Not time for a proper update but here’s a very quick video [ Show youtube player ] - I’ve tweaked the frogmen (they were far too brutal before, haha, they’re supposed to be mini (mini!) boss level annoyance not a virtually undefeatable one.

First look at the (likely protototype) of Anna’s most basic sword attack, as well as the WIP new attack animations. TY rare and whoever that was on YouTube for bumping attack animations up my todo list and also huge thanks to Tsak for giving excellent pointers and examples.

[Predseda]

Cute miniboss, especially sounds.

[Mixel]

I have a new blog post on Mixelslab.com.. Explaining some of the thought behind, and processes involved in the frog boss/below swamp stage.

Here’s the WIP frog footage, I’ve since fixed most of the problems in the video, done the portraits, etc.

Frog Boss WIP
[ Show youtube player ]

More small updates soon now I’m back in the groove, and I’ll hopefully be back streaming again in the next day or two.

I really want to do another of those “big” videos showcasing a lot of stuff at once, so I’ll try having that done by next weekend? Hopefully!