- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Progress update:
Player hit sfx / reactions are implemented, mostly. Since the boss' current attacks can only slam you into the ground or send you flying, guess which two I implemented.
(looking into ways to stop the player from turning around on stand up; they're trying to look in the last direction of motion but were previously unable to turn around because of the animation blocking them).
For the record, animating a backflip is goddamn hard.
Also redid the leg hub piece, as you can see in the gif. There was previously a problem with the legs and how they were attached to the hub; whilst they were constrained to prevent them from moving too far apart... I stupidly forgot about angles, which meant the legs would 'slide' around the hub as they moved along. They were detached anyway before so it wasn't noticeable, but the constraints have been reworked now. Walkcycle had to be fiddled with a bit as well, since it partially relies on the leg constraints pulling the hub around. Foot placement should be better now.
Right now, my major remaining 'key tasks' are regarding the player. Firstly, they need a UI for obvious reasons, secondly I probably need to implement some sort of dodge move. I was umming and erring on this, but now you can actually fight the boss proper (and get stomped/flung if you get hit), it's a lot more obvious that the boss is currently very good at hitting you even if you're running around. It can, hilariously, kick you in mid-air.
Oh, and I also want to add an upward swing to the sword's moveset, for when what you're targeting is overhead (so the usual horizontal swings will miss). That can happen quite a lot. Adding more sound/sfx in general is also an on-going task to make the game feel more responsive in general. My audio skills are craaaap and consist of finding sound clips from free sites, layering them together in Audacity and trying to fiddle and bash things until it sounds not awful with my fingers crossed. A pro at this I am not.
I'm also umm-ing / erring on art style for bosses. Currently they're somewhat 'realistic' in terms of textures / materials, and I'm considering making them more cartoony like the character. Windwaker is kind of my bible as far as game art design goes, especially as an indie dev; it's character and environmental art is clean, crisp, clear to read and does a whole lot with not very many polygons or detail and no time-consuming normal mapping and so on (yes I know BotW has a similar style but I haven't played that so hush). Whilst it's working okay right now, it's a bigger question for the Tree Theme parts I'm working on. Realistic bark vs toony bark are very different things.
Oh, and I re-added an old feature from a previous alpha just for funsies. The bosses have procedural names generated for them now. Meet Valourhardt, the Deranged Lord of Chivalry. I even added some extra features, like repeat protection, so you wont get, say, Valourhardt, the Chivalrous Knight of Chivalry, which could otherwise crop up; it goes [NAME], the [ADJECTIVE] [NOUN] of [NATURE], with Adjective picked from the Secondary Theme and Noun from the Primary. It checks the first four letters of the Adjective against the Nature, and if they're the same, re-rolls to get a different Nature to dodge the repeat. Names, meanwhile, are just two-part generated, a first half and a second half jammed together. There's another protection system in there to ensure the second half doesn't start with the same character the first half ended on. Pretty fun to mess around with these things.
Player hit sfx / reactions are implemented, mostly. Since the boss' current attacks can only slam you into the ground or send you flying, guess which two I implemented.
(looking into ways to stop the player from turning around on stand up; they're trying to look in the last direction of motion but were previously unable to turn around because of the animation blocking them).
For the record, animating a backflip is goddamn hard.
Also redid the leg hub piece, as you can see in the gif. There was previously a problem with the legs and how they were attached to the hub; whilst they were constrained to prevent them from moving too far apart... I stupidly forgot about angles, which meant the legs would 'slide' around the hub as they moved along. They were detached anyway before so it wasn't noticeable, but the constraints have been reworked now. Walkcycle had to be fiddled with a bit as well, since it partially relies on the leg constraints pulling the hub around. Foot placement should be better now.
Right now, my major remaining 'key tasks' are regarding the player. Firstly, they need a UI for obvious reasons, secondly I probably need to implement some sort of dodge move. I was umming and erring on this, but now you can actually fight the boss proper (and get stomped/flung if you get hit), it's a lot more obvious that the boss is currently very good at hitting you even if you're running around. It can, hilariously, kick you in mid-air.
Oh, and I also want to add an upward swing to the sword's moveset, for when what you're targeting is overhead (so the usual horizontal swings will miss). That can happen quite a lot. Adding more sound/sfx in general is also an on-going task to make the game feel more responsive in general. My audio skills are craaaap and consist of finding sound clips from free sites, layering them together in Audacity and trying to fiddle and bash things until it sounds not awful with my fingers crossed. A pro at this I am not.
I'm also umm-ing / erring on art style for bosses. Currently they're somewhat 'realistic' in terms of textures / materials, and I'm considering making them more cartoony like the character. Windwaker is kind of my bible as far as game art design goes, especially as an indie dev; it's character and environmental art is clean, crisp, clear to read and does a whole lot with not very many polygons or detail and no time-consuming normal mapping and so on (yes I know BotW has a similar style but I haven't played that so hush). Whilst it's working okay right now, it's a bigger question for the Tree Theme parts I'm working on. Realistic bark vs toony bark are very different things.
Oh, and I re-added an old feature from a previous alpha just for funsies. The bosses have procedural names generated for them now. Meet Valourhardt, the Deranged Lord of Chivalry. I even added some extra features, like repeat protection, so you wont get, say, Valourhardt, the Chivalrous Knight of Chivalry, which could otherwise crop up; it goes [NAME], the [ADJECTIVE] [NOUN] of [NATURE], with Adjective picked from the Secondary Theme and Noun from the Primary. It checks the first four letters of the Adjective against the Nature, and if they're the same, re-rolls to get a different Nature to dodge the repeat. Names, meanwhile, are just two-part generated, a first half and a second half jammed together. There's another protection system in there to ensure the second half doesn't start with the same character the first half ended on. Pretty fun to mess around with these things.
