Sunday, February 28, 2010

On health and maps


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. A is for punch and D for kick.


Hello!

Doubtless you all missed me - I was working on another project for a while, but now I'm backing with ever increasing vim!

Anyway, I've made a couple of changes that should hopefully make things easier when I finally get round to actually making the game (yeah, as if that's ever going to happen!). I decided I didn't want to have to draw a map for every level, so instead I've made a system which will automatically create a map from the level elements that I draw. So that's cool, innit?

Anyway, press M to see the map. The right hand space will be for giving extra information about places of interest.

Also, health! Yeah, I decided to be inspired (steal from) Oni for learning how much health an enemy has - each time you hit an enemy a sort of coloured circle appears. The colour of the circle indicates how much health the enemy has left. I tried giving the enemies health bars but it looked horrible. You might think this system looks horrible too, but wotcha gonna do about it? It's my game and I decide, ok?

Also, I've decided to build upon (rip off) Zelda for Dreg's health - little red circles in the top right (ok, in Zelda they're hearts, but still, very similar). Just like Zelda, you'll find objects that increase your maximum health hidden around the levels. In the sample above, you have one that increases your health by a whole circle, but in the actual game it'll probably only be a quarter of a circle at a time.

Finally, all of the enemies will drop some health every time you kill them. Try letting them get you close to death, then kill them to get your health back, there's a little colour thing going on when you're a third of your health down which draws from (copies) what we see in most FPSs nowadays.

Anyway, thanks for those of you who can still be bother to humour me - I know this is taking too bloody long!