I decided to get rid of GameBoy style input limitation in favor of 360° walking, aiming and dashing. This will open up a lot of possibilities for puzzles and give more freedom in fighting. So in the end players will be able to play on mouse/keyboard setup or using their favorite gamepad and play with analog sticks to aim dash direction.
With this I need to get rid of smooth-follow camera I talked about last time. Right now the camera is locked on player. I got inspired by the game Awesomenauts, right now I have a similar cursor to theirs and your charactes is always in the middle.
After a few small updates to the GrayScale I’ve realized that my previous concept of timing and physics was completely wrong! In short: I believed that firing extra physics steps when the timer missed 1/60 th of a second was a good idea. But what changed?
I’ve also spent some time on graphics. Preparing terrain tiles for Tiled is difficult but the results are fun to look at and really speed up level design. The bit challenge is to make compatible tileset that will work with Tiled, It needs many combinations.
I’ve been posting couple of GIFs around the internet from my GrayScale game but never explained how each thing works. This post was originally written at Snowkit.org. It is a good place to start, if you’re reading this then you would find some luxe-related things interesting. In fact I think I managed to create/discover at least one interesting thing about luxe that I wanted to share with you (physiiiics).
I won’t call myself an expert in programming and this post is in no way a tutorial on ”how to do things”. With luxe you can find your own way of coding. I’m just sharing what I discovered and had fun with :)
Some time ago I decided to keep updating GrayScale. It was created using HaxeFlixel, which is great for quick prototyping small games. Maybe it’s my limited knowledge of that framework but I discovered that It gave me too much problems while developing. Adding new enemy means lots of copy/pasted code or strict inheritance.
Next I found out that it tried to do most of the work for me. It’s usually not a bad thing, but when something goes wrong or when you start seeing performance issues on slower machines, you can’t quickly find what seems to be a problem. Another bad thing is that it lags horribly while recording a video, I’ve seen at least 2 lets-players who had issues with my game.
GameBoy Jam has ended some time ago and my game ranked #7 in the competition. Among ~250 submitted projects I find it as small personal success and I wanted to thank everyone who voted :)
I’ve had really great time during the jam. Seeing other people’s projects being built step by step was really interesting and empowering experience. I could follow many games progress from the scratch, many of them with different mechanics and ideas. Game jams are one of the best ways to get into creating and finishing your small games and I surely will attend to some of them in the future.
