Filling adventure mode with items
Hello! The world map of my game's adventure mode is pretty much done, so I spent the last two weeks working on the various other parts of adventure mode that will take it from 80% complete to 100%.
Bottles
Adventure mode now has a refillable bottle hidden somewhere in the game world. You can fill it with health potions that automatically revive you with a few hearts of health when you die, or bomb potions that automatically refill your bombs when you use them all:
It took a while to find space for it on the adventure mode HUD, but I managed eventually:
Items
I already had a vague idea of which items and abilities I wanted to have in adventure mode, but there's a big difference between having a vague idea of things and actually deciding which item should be in every single treasure chest in the enitre game. So I spent a while mapping that out, and started drawing the sprites for each item. My favorite item sprite so far is the pair of spring shoes, which gives you the ability to jump:
Coins
Enemies in adventure mode used to drop tiny little coins when you defeated them, using the same coin sprites as Chessplosion's dungeon mode. You had to walk over to those tiny coins and pick them up yourself which really felt like a chore, especially if you knocked an enemy all the way to the other side of the screen.
I wanted to make two big changes to those coins: I didn't want picking them up to be a chore, and I wanted them to look good. My secret goal was to try and make the coins look so good that I would want to put them in arcade mode too, like the coin showers in various arcade shooting games.
So I drew a bigger spinning coin and made a bunch of them fly out of defeated enemies, automatically accelerating towards the player:
I love how they look! I’ll try hooking them up to arcade mode soon.
I updated my Aseprite plugin
I released an update to C.T. Anti-Aliasing, my free Aseprite extension that automatically applies the type of single-color pixel art anti-aliasing that I often used to do manually. I mostly used it for things like the Ducky's Delivery Service title screen logo and cutscene portraits, but it still gets a bit of use in my gameplay sprites too.
The new version supports the fill and the outline being on separate layers and has the option of forcing the anti-aliasing color to use your sprite’s color palette, along with various other small improvements:
It’s available for free on itch if you’re interested!
Anything else?
I've been learning to play Violent Storm, a 1993 arcade beat em up from Konami. Its core mechanics don't feel quite as solid as Capcom's beat em ups, especially when it comes to the boss fights, but its presentation and its pacing make up for it. It's like playing a regular beat em up on fast forward and I love it!
Fight Kingdom, a fighting game tournament in the pacific north west US, was last weekend. It's rare to see a tournament with Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Super Street Fighter II Turbo in its main game lineup these days and I had a great time watching it, so go watch the twitch VODs if you missed out!
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I hope you have a relaxing couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!