Shops, NPCs, and sending enemies flying
Hello, I hope you're doing well! It's been a busy couple of weeks, and I've made a lot of progress on programming my next game's adventure mode.
Sending enemies flying
First off, I added a new effect when an enemy gets slammed into a wall or caught in an explosion. They previously used to just disappear, but now they go flying into the air instead. Huge thanks to boghog for the suggestion, as it turned out even more satisfying than I expected!
I made this feature over a week ago but I'm still shocked at how much of a difference it makes to the overall feel of the game. Everything feels so much more fun now. It's a nice reminder that as much as I care about all the intricate details of the game balance and enemy behaviors, this game at its core is about how good it feels to use a big cartoon hammer to send enemies flying into walls. I hope you end up enjoying that feeling too!
Shops, NPCs and story events
This week I added shops, NPCs and story events to my new game's adventure mode! I wanted to have the same basic "three items on the floor" shops as Chessplosion's dungeon mode:
But unlike Chessplosion, I wanted you to be able to interact with the shopkeepers a bit more and I wanted to have support for basic quests and story events, without having to write any in-game dialogue. So I made some NPCs that will react if you buy something in a shop or bump into them, I gave them the ability to "speak" using speech bubbles with pictures in them, and I added support for basic story events and cutscenes:
The carpets on the floor and the money sprites are temporary placeholders that I took from Chessplosion, but everything else about shops, NPCs and story events is complete. I can start building the game's world soon!
Sylvie RPG and making games quickly
I played the free browser game Sylvie RPG last Friday night and I loved it! It's one of the best new games I've played in a long time, and it's one of the rare action RPGs that manages to be fun as an action game and an exploration game and an RPG all at once. I highly recommend it, and I really loved the 55 page pdf of design notes that you get if you pay for the game.
The main thing that shocked me was that sylvie made the game in just five weeks. That's so much faster than I would be able to make something of that size! It got me thinking about I would have to change my work process if I ever want to make some small games that quickly in the future without burning myself out.
The biggest obstacle, other than overambitious game design ideas that I have to spend way too long testing out, would be that I'm pretty slow at drawing my games' pixel art. Sylvie RPG uses an ultra low-detail 49x49 resolution (compared to my games' 640x360 resolution), so maybe I could try doing something like that.
I was thinking about this over the weekend, and then on Monday I stumbled upon some unused Ducky's Delivery Service pixel art landscapes that I drew last year:
These are so much cuter than I remembered! I love the little ghosts and seagulls and everything else. So maybe I could make a little game that looks like this one day, if I wanted to make something with a shorter development time...
It's time for a vacation
We're almost a quarter of the way through the year! I haven't taken any vacation yet and I'm pretty tired, so I'm taking next week off work.
I'll let you know what happened next next time. I imagine I'll end up spending more time thinking about making smaller games, trying to get back into music composition again, or doing something else entirely. Who knows?
I'm sure I'll have a great time regardless, and I hope you have a great couple of weeks too. See you next time!