Time to flex those platforming muscles

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.

This post is mostly focused on acrobatics. If you want to see what combat will be like in this game go to this post!

Look - a new place to run around in! Try to find the little podium - there's more than one way to get there (the more difficult the path, the faster it is).

But what's the point?

Well the thing is I've been thinking about how the game is going to be set up, and it dawned on me that I had a whoooole lot of level designing in front of me, so I wanted to work on my "level editor" to make it quicker and easier to use. I found lots of nice little tricks and techniques, as well as programming a lot of stuff that would automate the boring bits.

There are still a few issues - it's annoying that I have to have floors overshoot walls, instead of having nice, clean corners. This is a collision detection problem (as always), though I've already started working on a solution for that.

In any case, I thought I'd give you something to do as well as try out my new level building tools by making this little area (I say little, but it's the biggest I've made so far).

It was a useful experience because it showed up several bugs that I had to sort out (more collision detection fun!). The nice thing is that my collision detection engine is getting better and better, all without having too big of an effect on the frame rate (animation and big images are still the big processor hoggers). Increasingly I feel completely free in how I design my levels - just that corner thing that still needs to be sorted out...

In any case, please, feel free to try to break the game! Find walls that let you drift through, areas that are too difficult/easy/stupid. Any ideas you think could improve level design etc. As always, your feedback is really, really useful to me!

So what's next?

Well I want to start making the game elements that make up a real level - a sense of progress. This means NPCs, items, switches and all of that nonsense. This also means developing a talking mechanic to have Dreg interact with other characters. I imagine the next update will be just that...