Environmental hazard

Arrow keys for movement and crouching, spacebar to jump. Use arrow keys while swinging to increase his spin. Hold down spacebar to make the jump last longer. Hit spacebar again when holding on to a wall to wall jump.

I'm back!

After a very relaxing week of teaching English to Spanish people and playing Xbox, I'm back on the Dreg project.

Quick note: this update is just to let you know how I'm getting on. If you actually want something interesting to do, go to the previous update and try to beat up all of the thugs.

I'm quite satisfied that one of my many fans is so good at my game that I can't beat his high score. It's a mixed feeling - getting beaten at your own game, but it's also vaguely satisfying.

That said, I also know some people haven't been able to get onto the rankings at all! I guess I can't expect the very, very casual player to want to play this game in its entirety, though maybe the first couple of missions should be easy enough for all.

Anyway, I've had enough of working on combat, and I'm starting to work further on level elements. On this particular update, you'll notice that the red line at the bottom of the level is bad, and you're not supposed to touch it.

Now I don't want this game to have cheap deaths. I see this more as a Zelda type game, where falling into an abyss doesn't kill you - it just resets you somewhere and takes some health away. So Dreg will do the same, but that meant programming a reset function.

So whenever Dreg is standing on safe ground, that position is recorded so that should he jump, or drop off a surface and land in some lava / poison gas / toxic waste etc. he'll be placed back in that position. Hopefully the threat of being boiled alive should add an incentive to the acrobatic sections of the game!

This meant I also had to play around with the camera movement (the nice little catch up movement the camera does when Dreg is reset) and some little tweaks like not having Dreg spawn right on the edge of the floor (so that if the player happens to be pressing a direction key as Dreg is reset he doesn't just go falling off the floor again) and the invulnerability flashing stuff.

Next step will be moving platforms! I foresee all sorts of potential headaches!

One thing I've noticed is that as I'm programming, the "right" way of doing something is obvious to me, but it feels like too much work trying to set it all up. So I'll try to hack my way to an easy solution, often resulting in hours of experimentation and wasted time. It's only the next day, when I've exhausted all lazy potential solutions, that I try what I always knew I should have done, and get it working within half an hour. I really need to learn that if I can't be arsed to program it correctly, I should stop programming...

Anyway, thanks for everybody giving me support on this project. Don't you fear - it's definitely going to get finished. I've already started doodling with pen and paper the details of level layout. It's great fun, as I'm sure you can imagine!