Get the current version of the game
Lots of progress since last time I posted. A lot of it is visual:
- I added a background graphic, as well as clouds that float across so the background isn’t too boring
- Changed the player character’s graphic to look more psychic-y, and also added animations for the characters hands. He now touches his chin when thinking, puts his hands out to the sides when flying, and points at the block when holding a block. His hands glow during flying, and his whole body is surrounded in an aura when attacking. When the character gets hit, his eyes and mouth change to reflect the fact that he’s stunned.
- Added an aura for the selected block, which is based on Jean Grey’s telekenesis aura in X-Men. Yeah, I’m a big nerd.
- Changed the block texture to brick
- Made a title screen; which has the character floating the title around.
All of the graphics were made by me, mostly in illustrator. I discovered illustrator’s blend function, which creates a given number of steps to ‘morph’ between two shapes, which is useful for making psychic auras.
I also found sounds for pretty much every event, although they aren’t all in the game yet. A friend of mine who has done some professional anime voicework has agreed to voice the construction worker, although this voicework will mostly consist of him saying “ow”.
Finally, I’ve started reworking the multiplayer to fix some of the problems I encountered in my multiplayer test. The main objections seemed to be that the attack abilities didn’t flow very well; you had to attack your opponent right before he won, because otherwise the level would end. The attack was powerful enough to destroy almost all of his structure, so he had to continually rebuild, which wasn’t much fun.
In the reworked multiplayer, the level doesn’t end when someone achieves a goal; instead, they get a new goal placed above the previous level section. This means the stage will have to scroll up, allowing them to access the new goal. Players will get points for completing each goal section based on how quickly they do it, which helps balance out attacking with the need to keep building. I also want to add a ‘bonus goal’ for each section, which would be announced to the player each time they advance. Bonus goals would be things like ‘don’t use any plus blocks’ or ‘don’t attack while working on this section’ or ‘you can only freeze one block during this section’; players would get extra points for achieving the bonus goal, allowing you to catch up if you’re behind by building better than your opponent.
I’m also going to tweak the attacks to make them a) simpler and b) more subtle. I want to keep the fireball, but I’ll probably make it one large fireball instead of a lot of small ones. Unfreeze/Melt will stay in, and I may add things like friction changes, or the ability to place new red - points. Each attack will take full energy and some amount of time to use, so you won’t have to manager your energy quite as much in attack mode; you’ll just have to choose which thing to do and where to do it.
My progress on fixing multiplayer has so far just been separating out the rendering of the two team’s assets; this allows me to use a simple matrix transform to render the scrolling. Strangely enough the hardest part of this is going to be the clouds, as they’re the only object which crosses from the left playing area to the right playing area.