LD Smith Games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXjbSZAU5I

Demonstration of all sockets thus far, now in HD!

Tonight I updated the ice gun socket, so it now has three levels of magnitude.  Ice +1 will freeze an enemy for 2 seconds, Ice +2 will freeze an enemy for 4 seconds, and Ice +3 will freeze an enemy for 6 seconds.  I’m thinking about expanding the types of Ice sockets.  I could have a Chill socket that just slows the enemy.  Also, I could have a separate Freeze socket which will allow the player to stand on the enemy without being damaged.

The fire gun socket is a new ability I added tonight.  The idea behind the fire gun is to apply burn damage over a period of time.  In order to do this, I had to scrap the two gun system of shooting ones and zeros.  That’s because the burn damage needs to just be a fraction of the actual weapon damage.  The damage over time concept does not work with the one and zero gun concept.  Overall, I felt that most players wouldn’t understand the binary blasting mechanic, and it was going to be problematic to correlate the binary sequence to decimal numbers in the game.  I may end up making the binary blasting concept a bonus mini-game.

The Fire +1 socket will burn the enemy for 5 damage each second for 3 seconds.  The Fire +2 socket does the same except for 6 total seconds, and Fire +3 will last for 9 seconds.  Currently, if an enemy is burning then it is just shaded red.

I also added Long +1, Long +2, and Long +3 sockets which increase the shot distance.  To implement this, I had to add a variable that keeps track of the distance modifier to the projectile Pellet class.  The base lifetime for a pellet is 20 frames, and for each increase in Long magnitude, 5 frames are added to the base lifetime value.  After I get multi-sockets working, I plan on allowing the Long socket to work with the Ice and Fire sockets.  However, I don’t know if I will allow Ice and Fire to be active at the same time.

Small update tonight to implement three new boot sockets.  These new sockets allow the player to float in the air after reaching the apex of the jump, if the jump button is still held.  The amount of float time is static (20 frames), and that time is doubled for the Float +2 socket and tripled for the Float + 3 socket.

 

As with the “looking up” and “looking down” states, the floating state does not currently have animation sprites.  Therefore, I just have the word “floating” display on the player for testing purposes.

Floating could have been implemented many ways, but I like booleans so I created an isFloating bool to signify if the player is floating.  I also have an integer tracking the amount of float time.  When the player jumps, if a Float socket is equipped then the float time integer gets set to the number of frames that the player should float based on which Float socket is equipped.  When the player’s jump acceleration reaches zero, then the isFloating value gets set to true if the float counter is greater than zero.  Otherwise, the player will start falling.  On each update, the float counter is decremented until it reaches zero.  At that time, the player will start falling as they normally would after reaching the jump apex, and the isFloating bool gets set to false.  The separate bool and integer variables may be slightly redundant, but I think it makes the code more readable.  A future optimization could be to replace the bool variable with a function that returns true if the float time is greater than zero and false otherwise.

I also slightly modified the crouching code.  If the player is walking and rolls the control stick to the down/forward position, then the player will walk and look down.  From this state, if the player rolls the control stick completely down, then the player would still be looking down and standing (not crouching).  This was to prevent the player from crouching when holding down and forward, when the player should be moving.  In ResistorKit, I only have methods that fire when up, down, left, and right are pressed or released, so the crouching code was only fired when the down and pressed action was fired.  The player is not allowed to crouch if the jumping, falling, or walking states are active.  To fix this, in the code that causes the player to stop walking, I added code to set the player to the crouching state if the player is looking down.  This behavior is slightly different from other classic platformer games that also don’t set the player to crouching when rolling from foward to down, but I feel that my new way feels more natural.  With the old way, the only way to crouch was to press directly down from a standing position which feels clunky.

Floating was a fairly simple mechanic to add in about two hours.  I’m hoping to get back to character modeling, but there is a huge learning curve for me to complete that task.

Found a great video tutorial on modeling a human head in Blender.  First of all it instructs to use a subdivision modifier to make the starting cube a spherical object, with 2 View subdivisions.  Then in edit mode, the proportional editing tool (key “o”) is used with moving vertices to give the object more of an egg shape.

 

Then, half of the head mesh is deleted and the mirror modifier is applied to ensure that the head has a symmetrical shape.  Then the Loop Cut tool is applied twice (Ctrl – R – 2) to add additional vertices and edges around the neck.

 

Finally, more vertices are moved around with proportional editing to give the neck a more realistic shape.  This is just a start, so I’ll have to add the body later in addition to making the face look more like my character design.