Archive:
I don’t know why this popped into my head, but anyone remember the cover of The Incredible Shrinking Fireman? Old Mastertronic game. No? Me neither until last night. I remember having it for the CPC, yet I can’t remember a thing about the game. Anyway, that lead me to doing something with the fire spouts from the first game, so I remade them, and set them up in a Boom Box room.
It’s far easier than it looks. You can safely walk around the edges of the room, and easily jump over the fire as it moves across. It’s just a bit of timing.
Added some water audio to the purple death fountains I made last week, and got rid of the nasty flash that was coming from the emitters. I’m assuming this is an engine bug; on the last frame, mesh particles will be bright white, rather than whatever colour you’ve lerped them to. Took me a while to figure out where it was happening, but I hacked around it by quickly scaling the mesh’s size to zero. You can’t flash white if you can’t be seen.
The idea for The Battlements has always been to make something related to Hunchback. I have memories of the Amsoft version, that I must have got with my CPC 6128, although I have no memory of ever having it on disc. Dixons might have thrown in a cassette bundle, or something? Anyway, I hated the bastard thing. Stupid pixel perfect jumping and really frustrating timing. It says a lot that a perfect playthrough – I’ve just checked on YouTube – only lasts 3 minutes. It does fit with what I’m doing here, though.
Blocked out a very short run, and laid the room out. I really couldn’t be bothered to try and model a knight, but there was a really tidy one on the marketplace for 15 quid, so I grabbed that, re-rigged it, re-skinned it, and made a start on the animations.
Whoah, this took all day to balance. I was expecting to bang this out…
I’ve added bats, the horizontal arrows, and the knights jump up as you approach. And they’ll happily poke you up the bum with their swords if you get too close.
I couldn’t get the knight’s wrist to follow a perfect vertical line while I was animating the jump – there’s probably a way to do it with some IK, or a constraint. I’ll need to swot that, one day… – so the sword always had a slight wobble, which looked awful. So… In true coder-art fashion, I hacked that. Instead of snapping the sword to the wrist socket, the Sword has a look for where it should be, and the Tick moves it up and down to follow the animation. Ship it!
My first layout of the room was nails. Hilariously tricky. The bats totally change how difficult it is to cleanly jump over everything, so it took lots of tweaking of speeds, spawn durations, flight paths, and heights to get to something that was doable, but not too crazy. And then I remembered that I’m on an ultrawide, so I had to re-do a load of it because you couldn’t see as far enough ahead if you on a 16:9.
In the end, I had to push the camera further back than I would have liked, but if I don’t, there simply isn’t enough warning…
I need to add some tells to the guns (little pre-spawn particle effect to show them powering up), and more than likely, some audio on the arrows so you can hear them fly toward you.
That background desperately needs something in it, but I’m not sure what….
Solved the problem with the background! Added a tiled roof. Dur.
I’ve added tells to the guns, and a little tell to the final knight in The Battlements, along with impact VFX for his sword swipe. His tell’s a bit useless – he doesn’t pause at the top of the swing for very long – but it’s better than nothing.
The Battlements are basically there, sans audio.
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My idea for The Roof was to use the bats in a Galaga style, “Challenge Stage”. So I’ve made a Cannon, (similar to the one that fired Boing Balls in the first game) and got that under player control.
Enhanced Input’s really handy here. I created a new Input Mapping Context, pushed that on to the player controller with a higher priority, and bingo-bongo, the input gets consumed, and I pass it on to my little cannon. Although, it’d be nicer if any actor could register an Input Action responder, without having to plumb back through the player’s controller.
I’ve hacky-bodged this together super quickly. One off thing. Ship it! etc.
And by a total fluke, you can see the Zub constellation from here! Haha! Yus!
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Phil sent me a big pile of music noodles, which are sounding superb. I’ve picked out my favourites and given him some feedback about where I’ll use them. I think, next week, I’ll add them to the build and write the music system. It’ll feel more like Lumo with Dopedemand pumping out of the speakers.
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