Rejected enemies from my new game, and Ducky's Delivery Service S ranks
All the S rank times in Ducky's Delivery Service
Today I uploaded a video of all the S rank times in Ducky's Delivery Service, for delivering flyers and for the special delivery stages.
One of the hard parts of getting an S rank time in these stages is figuring out whether or not your route is even fast enough to be able to get an S rank time, especially in the flyer delivery stages where you can deliver packages in any order you choose. So I wanted to have a video of each stage out there, to give people the option of looking up a route if they're struggling to find one.
That said, even if you know a viable route, it's still difficult to get these times. They're optional for a reason!
(Warning: this video contains Ducky's Delivery Service spoilers!)
If you're brave enough to go for the S rank times but you're struggling with a couple of stages, I hope you find this useful. Good luck!
I tried out tons of enemy ideas in my new prototype
I'm still working on my new prototype, which mixes the grid-based movement of Chessplosion with top-down action adventure games like Ys and the 2D Zelda series. One of the main changes I made this week was zooming in the camera a bit, but I've mostly just been experimenting with every single way I can think of making enemies attack the player.
One of the challenges I wanted to tackle was coming up with fun short-range enemies to fight against. You can defeat enemies by bumping into them, so melee enemies have to come up with different ways to be interesting to fight against.
Two ideas that turned out well were enemies that lunge a couple of grid squares at a time, and enemies that fire a stream of short-range projectiles:
I tried lots of other random enemy ideas too, with mixed results. This video shows a few of them: one that shoots projectiles in 8 directions like the queens in Chessplosion, one that jumps around and shoots out shockwaves when it lands, one that throws fireballs that leave a pool of lava where they land, one that throws bombs that explode when they land, one that explodes when it takes damage, and one that leaves a trail of flames wherever it goes.
I tried a few other things out too, such as enemies that can block attacks from the front, and various other projectile-shooting enemies.
After all my experimenting, I came to a couple of conclusions:
Diagonals feel weird. Even though Chessplosion's bishops and queens shot projectiles at 45 degree angles and the knights moved at whatever angle a chess knight moves at, it feels strange to have enemies that shoot or move or throw at diagonal angles in this game. It might feel okay if I have an enemy that slides diagonally a single tile at a time and maybe I can even add a few enemies with 45-degree attacks towards the end of the game, but for the most part I want to avoid it.
Blocking gets annoying quickly. I didn't show it in the above videos but I also experimented with enemies who could block attacks from the front, meaning you had to hit them from the side or behind to deal damage. Fighting more than one or two of these enemies quickly became a chore, because you had to go through so many steps just to deal damage to them. In addition, it felt awful if an enemy turned to face you and block your attack just as you were about to hit them. If I end up keeping enemies who can block your attacks, it will probably just be a single boss or miniboss who doesn't turn around much.
So that means that the bulk of the game's enemies will move and attack straight left, right, up, or down. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I think there's still lots of room for creativity. I can still have enemies that teleport, or don't move at all, or fly through walls, or attack with various non-diagonal attack patterns, or move in different non-diagonal patterns, or have weak spots, or push you instead of damaging you, or act differently depending on whether or not you're facing away from them, or turn invincible for short periods of time, or eat your shield and force you to buy another one. Okay that last one has already been taken by Zelda, but you get the idea. There's still a lot that can be done. And mixing different combinations of enemies will make things even more interesting.
I can also mix things up by working on the environments! Right now we just have rectangular rooms with a few walls in them, but there are all sorts of things that could potentially spice things up: pits, spike traps, ice, lava, conveyor belts, teleporters, breakable walls, and so on. I have no idea which of these things will make it into the final game, but I want to start experimenting with some of them next week.
Anyway, that's my progress! It's still very early in development, but I'm getting closer to figuring out what's fun in this game and what isn't. I hope you're having a great week, and I'll see you next Thursday with another update!