I hadn’t really thought about level hazards much, but I decided that a platformer really isn’t a platformer without spikes. Ideally I’d want them to be in the tile editor, rather than entities like enemies which are placed individually, so I went ahead and took a couple of days to add spike tiles and make them work. This was actually a good exercise, not only because it added something the game needed but because it also lead naturally into working on some other stuff. Namely, there’s now a system in place for temporarily stunning the player after she gets hit, and for providing a brief period of invincibility to go with it, both if which I would have wanted anyway in pretty short order after I got enemy attacks working.
After that, I spent a little while making an animation for hit stun, and today I got it implemented in-game along with a few changes to the movement code making the character behave a little bit differently during stun. I hadn’t considered it until writing this, but honestly I’m probably going to want to implement a very similar system for enemies so that they get stunned on hit as well. This is relatively low priority, but is something I should maintain in the back of my head.
Anyway, here’s what the stun prototype animations look like:
Currently the character is perfectly still with just the hair and cloth moving. This was a decision I made so it would loop smoothly, and it’s mostly intended just to be used for quick transitional moments, but that might be something I’ll change, adding a bit of tremble to the limbs or sword. Not sure. I’m also not entirely happy with the movement of the hair, it doesn’t feel like it’s quite ‘rolling’ enough, more just snapping back and forth.
I’m going to start experimenting this week with not working on the game every day, but instead working on it 4-5 days a week for 3-4 hours each day. My hope is that by sectioning out a big block of time like this for me to focus on the work exclusively, I’ll be able to do higher quality work faster, more than making up for the days I’m taking off. Essentially I want to cut out the extra stress from trying to do a bunch of different things every day, and try to do one thing right instead.
So the next major task for the game, which I’ll try to do in one 3-4 block of work, is to change the way the entity system works so I can make quick anonymous entities instead of making each and every one an instance of a named template. This will make it a lot easier and more flexible to create attack entities, at which point I can go back into the entity I’ve been working on and implement its attack: at that point I’ll have everything in place to start testing and improving combat in the game, and I can start making test areas to make sure all of the core gameplay works in a satisfying way.