Christmas Game Dev. Journal - Week 7

Designing 'Lt. Igor Sickle' the War Yeti...and some Code

from JoeUser Forums

Another quick journal entry...unfortunately I've been working on a lot of small things that aren't full completed (Second Player animation, final BG art, ect), so while it may seem like I'm slacking, these logs don't list the unfinished tasks.  ;)

Last week I had made some changes to how the maps were loaded, leaving my previous entry less interactive then I had hoped. This week I've fixed that, so you'll get to actually test the current "sandbox" version of the game that I'm currently working on.


Please give it time to load...it's getting quite large :(

I fixed a few bugs, so this is actually much more solid than last weeks version (that I couldn't upload). Anyone new to programming will find that, even once a feature is implemented, a lot of time will go into polishing that code to work with other game features.

One feature I did get in was the "Double Jump", where pressing the jump button while mid-air will let you jump again. However, (as a game player) I'm slightly torn on how it was implemented. While on the ground, you can press and hold the button to charge your jump. When in mid-air, however, holding the jump button too long will result in the player falling...getting rid of the "I can stay in air forever my holding the jump button" cheese mechanic, but still letting you charge your jump if you're careful.

I think this works, but again, it can be deceiving when you're too close to the project.

Besides tweaking and polishing code, I also worked on designing the first boss creature: a War Yeti named "Lieutenant Igor Sickle", one of the commanding officers under in Old Man Winter's army. I won't talk about it too much, but here are the progression shots of the Leutenant.

 


The Rough Draft

The Colored Design

The Final

I'm pretty happy with him, and if you like, I whipped up a wallpaper version of him for the wincustomize libraries.

Well, one more week and I'm hoping to have the entire engine done. It's going to be tight, but I'm still shooting for feature completion. After that, I'll have 10 full weeks to just focus content creation (which there's alot of) while simply tweaking the engine, opposed to making huge changes up until release.

That's never fun.

 

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Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Looking good!
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Good job. I love games with a double jump, so that is a cool addition. You may want to build in the ability to walk off of ladders when you are at the bottom rung, instead of having to jump off al the time though.
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
I tweaked the ladder thing so that you can move of either edge and hop off, but (as silly as it sounds) being able to walk off when you reach the bottom will take considerable tweaking. I wont go into details, but in the end, the coding logic that mechanic needs directly contradicts the logic needed to climb ONTO a ladder from the ground, which is much more important.

Anyways, as always thanks for the feedback. I have the feature on my list, but there are several fundamental things I have to get done before the ladder code gets that extra bit of spit-shine polish
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
That's cool. I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of it. As for the double jump, I think it would be a little more intuitive if you couldn't charge the second jump. Of course, that is just my oppinion, and if you keep the "charged" second jump, that's cool too.

The game looks like it is going ot be pretty fun. I messed around with it a little bit to try and get it to crash, and I managed to do it a couple of times. If you want to know how I did that let me know, but both times were doing things that you probably wouldn't do normally.